Margie Nicholson

Margie Nicholson is a community media educator, writer, and advocate whose work contributed to the intellectual and practical case for public access television as a civic and educational resource. She received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication in 2008, recognition that placed her alongside scholars and practitioners who argued that public access was not simply a cable obligation but a participatory practice through which ordinary people could learn to use media for expression, organizing, and public dialogue.

The Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award recognizes humanistic contributions to the field rather than operational leadership, pointing to work done in scholarship, education, or advocacy, and Margie's receipt of it in 2008 reflected a sustained contribution to the ideas that give community media its civic purpose.

Her work helped give the field language for what it was doing and why it mattered, at a moment when that argument needed to be made clearly and repeatedly.