This weekend I attended the
National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. This was the fifth such conference, the first in three years, and my first ever. Hosted by
Free Press, the conference brought together 2500 policy makers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, comedians, academics, and lawyers who share a vision of a press and national discourse that actually serve their democratic functions to challenge power, challenge orthodoxy, and promote the free exchange of ideas. I thought the conference was fantastic: I learned a ton about the way media reform is actually working from many different angles, I made many new friends and twitter followers (the two are not mutually exclusive), met many people whose work I greatly admire: Glenn Greenwald, Greg Mitchell, Bob McChesney and John Nichols (two of the founders of Free Press), law profs Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, and Marvin Ammori. As cheesy as it sounds, I even learned something about myself.
So, with that introduction, a few of us that attended have agreed to write "what we learned" posts, which I hope will both demonstrate the breadth of knowledge being exchanged at the conference and serve as a reference for me when I want to remember what we talked about. (I seem to be the only person that didn't take notes.) I will link the posts from my fellow conference attendees at the bottom of this post.
