The SSRC has funded 44 Collaborative Grants in Media and Communications since 2006. The grants provide incentives for researchers, activists, and advocates to work together to define and address critical knowledge needs. The goal of the project is to make the field 'better' at producing and bringing to bear high-quality research in the service a richer, more participatory public sphere. Each of the funded projects provides an answer to this multi-sided challenge.

With this phase of grants drawing to a close, we offer some conclusions about the Collaborative Grants process and the picture of the field they present. Overall, the Collaborative Grants have focused on a small set of overlapping concerns: inclusion, localism, the need for better data about the media environment, and the need for evaluation and analysis of the field itself. Although these priorities were shaped by a number of factors--academic merit, 'usefulness', broader strategic goals of the projects, among others--we see a strong and growing connection between this set of critical knowledge needs and the capacities of the research community. Contributing to this growth, we would argue, is the most valuable outcome of the Necessary Knowledge project.

The Collaborative Grants Research Agenda

The Collaborative Grants clustered around four broad themes: inclusion, localism, better data, and analyses of the field itself.  While by no means an exhaustive agenda for the field, these four issues arguably constitute the most representative agenda of the field in the past three years--one that bridged media reform and justice communities, tracked major policy debates, and found strong resonance among academic researchers.

• Inclusion: Social, political, and economic inclusion increasingly depends on access to media and communications services--especially the Internet. It also depends on the capacity to be heard and represented in public life, whether as media producers or as engaged citizen and consumers. Collaborative Grants have focused on both aspects of inclusion, and on the infrastructural issues that bring them together.
• Localism: The local media ecology--emphasizing news, local programming, and forms of dialogue between media outlets and their communities--is critical to democracy and widely perceived to be in crisis. Collaborative Grants have repeatedly examined the sustainability and efficacy of local news and community media, on issues ranging from local news coverage, to media accountability, to changing audience metrics. 
• Better Data: Public policymaking is severely undermined by poor data collection and unequal access to existing (often privately-gathered) data. This failing has repercussions at all levels, from policy battles to the more fundamental challenge of describing the media environment in which we live. Collaborative Grant projects have consistently highlighted and sought to address these weaknesses.
• Reflection and Evaluation: Collaborative Grants have consistently worked to strengthen the feedback loop between research and practice--a critical condition of long-term sustainability of social change and reform efforts. Grants have supported a wide range of analyses and evaluations of the public media sector itself, from field-mapping efforts, to the analysis of reform strategies, to the evaluation of new participatory media models, to reflections on existing institutional practices.

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Policy Interventions

The Collaborative Grants have been responsive to shifting policy debates and their sometimes urgent research needs. Media ownership was by far the most prominent policy issue in our work, reflecting repeated FCC engagement with this issue since 2006. Policy battles around municipal wireless broadband efforts and radio spectrum licensing policies have also received sustained attention.

• Media Ownership: Debates about the deregulation of media ownership dominated the FCC agenda in 2006 and 2007, and turned primarily on claims about the impact of media concentration on localism and diversity. The SSRC sponsored nine studies of ownership during these proceedings--both new analyses and reviews of the FCC's research and policymaking process.
• Municipal Broadband: Several high profile municipal wireless broadband efforts stalled in 2007 and 2008, in several cases because private partners balked at the costs of meeting municipal requirements for coverage and inclusion. The Collaborative Grants project supported five studies to document these experiences and develop best practices that put municipal broadband efforts on sounder footing moving forward.
• Spectrum Allocation and Licensing: 2007 and 2008 also saw a series of important developments in the regulation and use of radio spectrum, both for radio stations and in efforts to expand wireless broadband services, with more to come in the next years. Collaborative Grants supported several projects focused on available or underutilized spectrum--often in the absence of government data--and a study of licensing and business models for radio stations. 

Emerging Needs

The larger concerns of the Collaborative Grants program will be with us for the long term.  Inclusion and localism are basic and enduring goals for media in a democratic society and will require serious rethinking and innovation. Problems of data collection and access to data are fundamental to policymaking, and the current failures in this area are several decades in the making. A reflective analysis of social change efforts is a necessary condition of longer-term success.

With the privileged view afforded by 300 proposed collaborations and a wide range of consultations and meetings on media and communications, we flag several emerging issues for more systematic attention. These are not 'policy issues' in a narrow sense. Rather, they are structural problems for the field as we work to understand requirements of--and paths toward--a diverse and inclusive public sphere.

• Access to Content: Both media regulation and community engagement with the media are closely tied to issues of media content. The FCC has mandates to support diversity, localism, educational programming, and other normative goals. Measuring these goals, however, is increasingly difficult, when not impossible. No systematic record exists of audiovisual culture--either broadcast or Internet. With a few narrow exceptions, both researchers and regulators fall back on poor and incomplete proxies for content, such as programming logs or diversity in ownership. This problem touches on a wide range of policy issues--many of which have been the subjects of SSRC grants--but is fundamentally about whether there will be any enduring record of our increasingly audiovisual culture. The obstacles are no longer primarily technical, but rather regulatory. 
• Broadening the Public Media Conversation: Conversations about the future of public media in the US tend to reflect the immediate concerns of the main stakeholders: sustaining core public broadcasting institutions and the US institutional and regulatory context. In the current media environment, we would argue, this approach diminishes the likelihood that the key values of public broadcasting will find a secure place in the post-broadcasting, global media future. Our work has focused on broadening the public media conversation in two directions: building better connections with innovators in local media--arguably the most threatened layer of the American media ecology--and understanding the US experience as part of a wider transformation of public media systems. 
• The Poverty of Comparative and Global Research: Policymaking is increasingly a transnational process shaped by international agreements, multinational corporations, and global flows of media and information. Advocacy and activism at the international level has begun to adapt to these contexts and to the need for new mechanisms of accountability and transparency. However, comparative and global research has generally not kept pace with these changes, in large part because such work is challenging and expensive. The Necessary Knowledge program has funded international projects where it has seen particularly strong proposals and connections with program concerns around Internet policy, community media, and the 'traffic' in regulatory models. A more systematic approach to funding, aggregating, and learning from such work is has been beyond the scope of the Collaborative Grants effort, but is clearly needed as well.