Community Media - Key Characteristics

Key Characteristics

Community media is without market influences. Different groups of community media makers may follow this philosophy more strictly than others. Rennie points out that although there is a clear aversion to engage with commercial forces in the production of community media for obvious reasons, there may be times when some market interaction is desirable (p. 4). Essentially, this can serve as a means by which to avoid self-marginalization while still adhering to the principles of community interests and social objectives.

Community media is a form in which local news and information is spread directly to affected communities. The consolidation of ownership of media outlets into fewer and fewer hands has translated into a neglect for local reporting of news that impacts communities. Community media can be a remedy to this by allowing citizens to inform themselves about the issues taking place around them.

Community media outlets reflect their communities. They become integral to the communities which they serve. Such integration is achieved not only through ensuring their independence from commercial interests as referred to above, but also though ensuring their accountability to the particular community concerned. Often such accountability goes beyond the provision of opportunities to get involved in the operation and management of the service and takes the form of community ownership within a legally constituted non-profit distributing structure. When community media accountability works effectively, it ensures that the organisation concerned genuinely reflects the needs and aspirations of its community. Although in practice it may be arguable that no accountability structure can fully reflect such needs and aspirations (not least because some of these might be mutually exclusive) independence and agreed formalized structures for accountability and access can at least form a useful starting point in efforts to create the most appropriate community media vehicle for the community involved.

There is an important distinction between community media as a whole and grassroots media. Community media can be a form of direct local level media; however, it also can be framed around a local issue pertaining to a community whose parameters can be national, international, and even global. Grassroots media on the other hand, as defined by Paul Riismandel of Mediageek, is focused more specifically on media making by and for the local community that it serves making the discussion more narrow and precise. There are a variety of other forms of media that may in some cases follow the community media model of access and participation but may have different social, political, and organizational strategies. Some of these forms of non-mass mediated forms of communication include alternative media, radical media, democratic media, participatory media, development media, and citizen media. Citizens' media, in particular, has some interesting characteristics. It is essentially a re-framing of community media by Clemencia Rodriguez that focuses on small scale media projects that look to bring different visions and perspectives to the "codes" that are so easily embedded in the social psyche (Rennie, 2006, p. 23).

All of these variations and different focuses allude to another key characteristic of community media in its broader perspective; geographic scope.