Keynote Address at the 2016 ACM National Conference in Boston.
John Nichols argues that America is in a democratic crisis in no small part because of the death of journalism in towns and communities throughout the United States. The answer is a media devoted to the needs of people and a reinvigoration of journalism in our town. He calls on us to respond to that crisis.
Nichols is the National Affairs Correspondent with The Nation magazine and associate editor of The Capitol Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He writes regularly on politics and media for In These Times and The Progressive, and appears regularly as a commentator on MSNBC.
With Robert McChesney, Nichols co-founded Free Press, the national media reform advocacy group which has championed media diversity, net neutrality and online privacy in the past decade. The author of many books, his most recent work with McChesney is People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy