Invitation

The following is going out to a great many people tonight. If, through some oversight, you do not recieve it in your email - please consider yourself invited anyway.

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Please forgive me if this is not the kind of thing you are interested in, you are not on a list and won't (unless you accept this invitation) receive any more like it. I will try to keep this as brief as possible, so if at any point I am not clear or you have questions feel free to email me at contact@justinbeach.com before deciding what to do with this.

Some of you are more familiar than others with PublicBroadcasting.ca, a site I started in response to the CBC Lockout. I believe firmly in public broadcasting and plan to continue to advocate for it on the site. That said, I also think that blogs, podcasts, internet radio, and now vidcasts are our last best hope for truly public media.

When television, film, radio and even the printing press came into existence the costs were too prohibitive for the general public to directly buy into them. They were, from the beginning, either owned by governments or private corporations whose motives were not always concerned with the public good and who were frequently detached from the lives of ordinary citizens.

There has been a growing call for many years for the media to be more responsive, more involved, and more representative of real people. The media tried to respond to these calls but these responses have largely served to show just how far removed from the real world programming executives are.

'Reality' television became a big money maker for them but there is very little correlation to the real world in stranding a group of people on an island, or shoving ten strangers into an apartment under constant video surveillance. Watching Harvard grads vie for the affection of Donald Trump may be interesting, but it is not a common experience. Canadian Idol is unapologetically about marketability, not talent. These are but a few examples to illustrate a point and I could go on forever but to the main point;

Blogging, podcasting, and other internet based technologies are - for the first time, a medium started by the public, with little or no funding. In other words, media from the bottom up instead of from the top down. They are, at least to a larger extent than any other media, responsive, representative, interactive and inclusive. They are also no longer below the radar. Politicians, business leaders, and the traditional media have noticed the power and popularity of this new medium and are moving as rapidly as possible to co-opt them, control them and/or turn them into yet another revenue stream.

From the beginning of publicbroadcasting.ca I recognized that blogging and podcasting were as much a form of public broadcasting as the CBC, or community radio and frequently a much more pure form.

It is in the hope of maintaining, and promoting true public, responsive, representative, inclusive, interactive broadcasting that I have started this Yahoo group. What form exactly that takes will be up to those of you who choose to respond to this. PublicBroadcasting.ca has, to date, been a solo project - but if it is going to achieve it's ends that has to stop. At the very least I need input and direction from people other than myself.

If you are interested in blogging, pod-casting or public broadcasting - if you are interested in issues of free speech and expression, or if you'd just like to share experiences, advice, tips and tricks, please consider joining and helping to keep public broadcasting and publicbroadcasting.ca open, inclusive and real.