Professional Experience

Nan Rubin has been strengthening and building infrastructure for community-based media for more than thirty years. Her business Community Media Services has been providing organizational assistance and support to public television and radio stations, independent producers, media service organizations, social justice groups and foundations since 1985.  Her specialties include feasibility studies, policy analysis, organizational assessments, and technology planning. 

With a strong technical bent, Ms. Rubin also provides technical assessments, facilities planning, and operations support for media and other non-profit groups, including analog to digital media conversions, media archiving, and the impact of new technologies on non-profits.

Ms. Rubin has long experience in policy analysis, planning and organizing.   She built two community radio stations � WAIF in Cincinnati, and KUVO in Denver � and is a founder of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) and a founding member of AMARC (Association Mondiale des Radio Diffuseurs Communautaires/World Association of Community Radio Broadcastersan international NGO based in Montreal, Canada.  

She has traveled widely to public radio, television and production facilities throughout the United States and abroad, and she has worked extensively with minority and ethnic media, especially Native radio, film and video.  For more than a decade, her report The State of Native Public Radio, was considered the definitive analysis of the successes and obstacles facing tribally-based reservation radio stations

Ms. Rubin spent more than two years as Director of Special Projects at The Funding Exchange in New York City, a national membership organization of social change foundations, making her especially qualified to produce Funding Media for Social Change, one of the few studies ever done on foundation support for progressive media activism.

In response to a renewed interest in media policy, in 2002 she organized the Highlander Media Justice Gathering,which was instrumental in launching several branches of the modern media reform movement, including the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), the founding of Free Press and indirectly the Media and Democracy Coalition. 

Between 2003 and 2010, Ms. Rubin was Project Director of Preserving Digital Public Television, a Library of Congress-funded project building a preservation archive for digital public television programs based at WNET in New York, and she is advising the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on creating the American Archive, and the European Commission on their media archive project PrestoPrime.

Other media clients include WGBH,  Radio Biling�e, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and The Ford Foundation. .

Ms. Rubin is currently Board Chair of the Prometheus Radio Project and sits on the Board of Manhattan Neighborhood Network.   In addition, she was a long-time member of the Board of Native American Public Telecommunications,   and a founder of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice,  a New York City-based organization.

She speaks frequently on panels and conducts workshops on a broad range of issues relating to media ownership, community-based media, spectrum issues, technology, and public policy, and in 2010 she testified at the FCC on the Future of Public Media  speaking of the historic and future role of community media.

Ms. Rubin serves informally as technology and policy adviser to a wide range of grassroots media and telecommunications groups, youth media projects, independent production organizations, and similar grassroots and local media groups where she often facilitates meetings and leads trainings. 

Recent publications include articles on digital video preservation in Library Trends Journal and International Preservation News, and she has presented internationally at conferences in Budapest, London and Copenhagen, as well as at the New York Public Library; the National Library of Medicine; Alliance for Community Media; NYC Grassroots Media Conference; Association of Independents in Radio; the Society of American Archivists; the Association of Moving Image Archivists; and the Open Video Alliance, among many others.

Ms. Rubin holds a B.A. degree in Sociology & Mass Communications from Antioch College, Yellow Springs OH (�71) and a Certificate in Public Broadcasting Management from the University of North Carolina Business School.  She was born in Newton, Massachusetts and resides in New York City.

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