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The Data Consortium
What's New:
Understanding the public sphere--and developing good public policy to support it--requires access to data about media and the public sphere: data on industry structure, audiences, programming, internet traffic, and other basic measures of our increasingly convergent media environment. In the U.S., much of this data is privately collected, and priced for large corporations. Independent researchers, public interest groups, and policymakers operate at a major disadvantage in this environment.
For many reasons, unequal access to data is a recipe for poor public policy. Notably, it makes the examination of policy proposals and evaluation of policy outcomes difficult at best. As this situation becomes the norm, media policymaking moves away from basic principles of public accountability.
The consortium is a vehicle for expressing the data-related concerns and collective bargaining power of scholarly and public-interest communities in this area.