Public media has a bright future. We have to start acting like it.
This is a lightly edited version of the keynote speech that Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride delivered June 27 in Kansas City to the annual conference of the Public Media Journalists Association.
A lot of people have a lot of questions about what is going to happen to public media. So, let’s talk about our future.
To do that, I want to start with a story from my personal and distant past that still informs how I think about public service.
The summer before my freshman year in high school, I volunteered as a candy striper on the pediatric floor in a local hospital. There were some really sick kids on this floor. I worked in a big classroom with arts and games. Most of the kids that I worked with had cancer or cystic fibrosis. Back then, in the 1980s, children with those diagnoses would spend weeks and months in the hospital.
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