I’m in a conversation right now in a pre-conference workshop, organized by Pat Aufderheide, on “Mapping Public Media,” and part of our charge is to think about what counts as public media in a contemporary media environment, and how we might protect and support that. Much of the conversation has turned on how we define public media, in a way that is generous enough to throw its net widely, but specific enough to be actionable by funders and lawmakers. But we’re also coming up with ideas for how to research and intervene in public media in useful ways.

So here’s my idea, built on a suggestion made by Kevin Barnhurst. Kevin’s point is that, rather than identifying something that counts as public media (the new NPR for the digital age) but rather we articulated certain  criteria and principles that public media should honor — transparency of funding and purpose, openness to user engagement, neutrality of platform, commitment to  ublic mobilization — then encouraged media to offer up data on how they serve those functions. This data would be very easy for third parties to scrape and analyze, and offer up to citizens and critics a lens on how our media are serving these various principles. My idea is we add to this a carbon “emissions trading” notion. Those that are serving these principles well would get support as public media. Those that were failing to meet these criteria could “offset” their footprint by buying credits against their “pollution”.

Its only a half-serious suggestion, but I like the idea that FOX News would regularly have to support DailyKos.