This concise text will help readers understand the ongoing fascination with do-it-yourself media around the world. Ellie Rennie explains how community media has, since its beginning, challenged the mainstream. A clear and useful guide for students, Community Media lays out the terrain in which community media theory and advocacy have located themselves, including the ideals of participation, community, and social change.

This concise, well-written book will help readers understand the ongoing fascination with do-it-yourself media. Ellie Rennie explains how community media has, since its beginning, challenged the theoretical and industrial frameworks of the mainstream. A clear and useful guide for students, Community Media lays out the difficult theoretical terrain that community media theory and advocacy has located itself in, including the ideals of participation, community, and social change.

This book offers a critical road map for understanding and researching "social innovation media"--initiatives that look for new solutions to seemingly intractable social problems by combining creativity, media technologies, and engaged collectives in their design and implementation. Presenting a number of case studies, including campaigns dealing with young people, Indigenous peoples, human rights, and environmental issues, the book takes a close look at the guiding principles, assumptions, goals, practices, and outcomes of these experiments, revealing the challenges they face, the components of their innovation, and the cultural economy within which they operate.

SYN (Student Youth Network) is a media organization run by people between the ages of 12 and 26. In this 'coming of age story, ' Life of SYN follows the SYNers as they build Australia's most unusual media empire against enormous odds. Over the course of SYN's history, social networking becomes the most popular internet activity and traditional media institutions are forced to acknowledge the rise of amateur content. In response, SYN rethinks its approach to the online environment, kills its print publication, deals with the introduction of digital broadcasting, and explains a new kind of literacy to schoolteachers. In just two years, dozens of careers are launched, and the SYN radio audience doubles in size. Life of SYN takes on the big issues of the media through the story of a small media organization. With humor and insight, it describes a media environment in flux, where audiences and producers express their freedom in unruly and contradictory ways. The book gives structure to the new media world without curtailing its inventiveness and possibility. Life of SYN combines story with media theory, encompassing digital literacy and media participation, the future of community media, youth media, and media industries