The Old Well at UNC Chapel Hill. Photo courtesy Flickr user kf4lnq.

If you’re interested in identifying ways to increase local accountability journalism, you may want to tune into a discussion taking place in North Carolina on Friday.

Beginning at 9 a.m., the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is holding a day-long workshop, which will be livestreamed to the public. As a backdrop for its discussion, the workshop will examine the FCC’s 2011 report on community information needs, which identified the loss of newsroom positions in recent years as “a threat to the quality of civic information available in communities around the nation.” Tomorrow’s workshop will be held three parts. In the morning, a round table discussion will identify gaps in accountability journalism in North Carolina. Next, representatives of Internet, cable and satellite television and mobile broadband service providers will discuss whether and how they could help to fill those gaps. Lastly, Professor Michael Gerhardt, director of the UNC Center for Law and Government, will lead a discussion that seeks to combine the findings and discussions into a set of policy recommendations. The idea for the workshop came from the deans of the Carnegie-Knight journalism schools, a dozen of the top journalism schools in the country (including UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication) working to transform journalism education. The workshop is one of 11 that are in the process of taking place. Carnegie Corporation of New York and Knight Foundation are dedicating more than $800,000 to help implement the recommendations of the FCC report, including support for projects to examine how tax law is affecting nonprofit media, to create a plan for state-specific C-Spans and to develop reliable metrics on media philanthropy. The workshop description, participant list and full program schedule are all available online. Tomorrow’s workshop is supported by Knight Foundation. A set of recommendations coming out of tomorrow’s workshop will be issued jointly by the deans of the top journalism programs participating in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.