Funding and Governance: The United States spends $1.38 per person each year on public broadcasting; that’s 98 percent less than countries like Finland and Denmark. Contrast that with the $565 each man, woman, and child in America spent bailing out insurance giant AIG. If funding for public media were to increase just to $5 per person that would generate more than $1.5 billion – a substantial increase over the $420 million the government spent on public media in 2008. This extra funding would enable new investments in enterprise journalism, while increasing educational and local fare.

So how do we do it? The creation of a public-media trust could be funded through a number of means, ranging from a simple congressional appropriation, to a tax on commercial broadcasters, to a spectrum-use fee for companies profiting from the public airwaves.

Funding is vital both for enabling public media to produce more high-quality content and for protecting public broadcasters from undue political pressures inherent to the annual congressional appropriations process. It would also help alleviate the negative influences associated with corporate underwriting of public media: namely, a reluctance to challenge the status quo or offend the sponsors.

Diversity and Expansion: Public media are overrun with what historian Eric Barnouw referred to as “splendidly safe” programming. While Antiques Road Show and Lawrence Welk specials appeal to a certain audience, public media’s current range of programming has little mass appeal to new communities, especially racial and ethnic minorities.

While media technology has advanced dramatically since the advent of public broadcasting, much of America remains unaware of the expansive variety of public media. Public media include a range of outlets and formats – including community radio and public access TV, muckraking magazines and independent producers – whose mission is to serve the public, not to earn a profit. Offering an alternative to mainstream media, this noncommercial sector aims to educate and engage audiences.

Harness the Digital Revolution: Public media require a 21st-century infrastructure to prosper in the digital age. This means building a national broadband backbone that would connect public media outlets with libraries, schools, public access channels, community organizations, and one another.

We must invest in creating tools that will make public media more dynamic and participatory, and we must put the vast libraries of public-media content online and into the hands of the public. We need to develop new platforms – from iPhone apps to open-source multimedia players – for all public media entities to use on their Web sites. We must get more hardware and software to stations to enable and embolden new media, innovative journalism, and creative production on all levels.