Guest For
Tuesday June 20,
2006
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NOTE!!
Dear Members of the List & Others:
We are VERY happy to announce:
Like a Beautiful Soaring PHOENIX - The
STREAMING
OF MNN PROGRAMMING IS BACK!!
Utilizing the much
improved Windows Media Player format:
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GUEST:
JOHN TARLETON
Volunteer Coordinator
/ Editor / Writer
New York City Independent Media Center
www.indypendent.org
www.indymedia.org
www.indykids.org
NYC Indymedia Phone Number:
212-221-0521
On the Origins and Context of Indymedia by
Evan Henshaw-Plath (Anarchogeek)
http://www.anarchogeek.com/articles/page/2
Love and Rage in Seattle by John Tarleton
http://johntarleton.net/wto.html
Subcomandante Marcos on the Need for an
Independent Media Network
http://www.tmcrew.org/chiapas/e_media1.htm
Nurturing New Writers at The Indypendent
http://indypendent.org/?pagename=testimonials
The Indypendent Sweeps The Ippies
http://nyc.indymedia.org/or/2005/10/59272.html
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text
Message Jihad
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6193
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More About: JOHN TARLETON, THE NEW YORK CITY
INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTER and THE INDY-MEDIA MOVEMENT
The global Indymedia network was launched in Seattle in November 1999 as a
website
and as a small downtown storefront space that was to be commonly shared by all
sorts of alternative radio, tv and print journalists who would be covering the
Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the
protests that were planned against the WTO. It was widely expected that
whatever protests that took place against the WTO’s profit-first policies
would be ignored or trivialized by the mainstream corporate media and that
some sort of counter-media presence had to be created to tell the rest of that
story. Indymedia was that response.
Indymedia was originally envisioned as a one-week endeavor that would close
down with the conclusion of the WTO meetings in Seattle. Of course, the WTO
protests in Seattle exceeded everyone’s expectations and as the police and
National Guard cracked down Indymedia--all of one week old--became an
indispensible news source for finding out what was really happening in the
streets. Activist-journalists could come in straight off of tear-gas soaked
streets and use a revolutionary new feature called “open publishing” and
upload their stories, photos, audio and video clips directly to the Indymedia
newswire which could be read by anyone in the world with a computer. In its
first week, Indymedia received over 1.5 million hits.
In the aftermath of Seattle, activists in other cities realized that they
wanted to have Independent Media Centers in their cities as they faced the
same problems of having issues they worked on frequently be ignored or
slighted by their local corporate media outlets. A second IMC opened in Boston
in Feb. 2000 and a third in Washington, D.C. in April 2000. By the end of
Indymedia’s first year, there were chapters in over 40 cities including New
York. One thing to be clearly noted about Indymedia is that it didn’t just
miraculously emerge in Seattle but was the product of years of collaboration
and cross-pollination of various alternative media movements from Public
Access TV to to documentary film collectives to pirate radio to zines to
earlier activist websites like the Direct Action Media Network and Infoshop.
Much of the theoretical inspiration for Indymedia came from a January 1997
communique from the Zapatistas and the source code that made open publishing
possible came from a tech collective based out of Sydney, Australia. It was
the serendipitous development of “open publishing” just weeks before the anti-WTO
protests that made it possible to bring everything together at the first
Indymedia center and leap to the next level.
Organizing for the New York City Independent Media Center began in May 2000
and it went on the air in September of that year. The newspaper was started at
the same time to serve people who were unable or unwilling to access the
Internet. In Indymedia, each local chapter is accorded a tremendous amount of
autonomy as long it adheres to basic core values of creating inclusive,
participatory, not-for-profit grassroots media rooted in progressive and
radical social movements and their struggles. The paper in turn was one of
several projects initiatived inside the NYC Indymedia Center including an
audio team that did streaming Internet broadcasts, a video team that produced
several feature lenght protest documentaries, a photo team and a web team that
oversaw the nyc.indymedia.org open publishing website.
The newspaper grew gradually during its first year. In the aftermath of 9/11,
we quickly produced a couple of special issues that asked hard-hitting
questions about where we were headed as a country and suddenly we found we had
a much larger audience. We had a surge of volunteers and I began holding
reporting workshops in Nov. 2001 to do basic skill shares around lede writing,
story organization, interviewing, research, etc., etc. We continue to do these
workshops several times a year.
Hundreds of volunteers have contributed to the paper in one form or another
whether as writers, editors, photographers, designers, illustrators,
distributors, tablers, etc., etc. A number of our people have gone on to
professional journalism jobs, to internships at publications like The Village
Voice and The Nation and to be admitted to the best J-schools in the country.
Others maybe only had one story they were burning to tell and we helped them
to do that. The members of our collective come from a wide variety of
backgrounds and interests. The oldest member of The Indypendent is a
78-year-old former Timesman who covered the U.N. for the Times in 1946 and who
now covers the U.N. for us. The majority of our volunteers are in their 20s or
30s, recently out of school and looking for an outlet where they can develop
their abilities and act on their idealism in a way that their daytime jobs do
not make possible. Some of our volunteers have years of professional
experience and others have no experience at all and learn as they go along.
..A few examples...Sarah Stuteville, Bennett Baumer, Sierra
Freeman...Volunteers not only write, edit and layout the paper but also do
distribution, fundraising and promotional work as well.
For making decisions, we use consensus process. No one can issue unilateral
orders or commands. A veteran member of the collective will tend to have more
influence during discussions than a newcomer because of their greater
experience. But for someone to get a decision made, they still have to
convince the group as a whole
that there’s is the best course of action.
Our current press run is 15,000 with thousands of more online readers. We went
biweekly at the beginning of the Iraq War and full-color a year later in the
spring of 2004. We’ve won more “Ippies” for excellence in community journalism
than any other member of the Independent Press Association of New York in each
of the past two years. Nonetheless, we still have a number of recurring
challenges we have to deal with due to the unique nature of this project
including reconciling our desire to be as democratic as possible to the need
to get a high quality paper out the door every two weeks, how to divide up
the “grunt work” that makes the paper possible, how to balance our coverage of
local, national and international stories which we see as interrelated, how to
detatch ourselves enough from our preconceived ideas to report in a fair and
accurate manner...no need to inflate or exaggerate. the truth can be damning
enough...
My role in all this is as an editor and a writer and as The Indypendent’s
volunteer coordinator. A long time ago I was graduate of the Univ. of Missouri
School of Journalism and covered sports and news for several daily papers. By
the time I was 24, I had left that world behind. I took the basic skills and a
deep desire to write with me but wanted to find and experience my own truths,
which I didn’t think could be found in either the university classroom or the
corporate newsroom. Over the next eight or nine years, I hithchiked over
75,000 miles in 17 countries always with a backpack full of books and
journals. At various times, I harvested wild blueberries in Maine, cherries
in Colorado, planted trees in the Virginia highlands, picked apples in
Vermont, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, was an English teacher in Mexico City, a
human rights monitor in Chiapas, a street performer in El Salvador and wrote
half a novel in France. I started producing my own website in 1995 at the
beginning of the Internet boom and met up with Indymedia in Seattle and
subsequently participated in several other of the early Indymedia websites
before hooking up with NYC Indymedia in May of 2001.
The Seattle WTO protests certainly played a big role in my connecting with
Indymedia. I went out there to write about it for my website and ended up
joining the direct action blockades that shut down the WTO and came out of it
with a much better story to boot. Looking over the Indymedia website
afterwards, I felt it came far closer to conveying the truth of what I had
seen and experienced and the remarkable people I had met and interviewed than
the caricatures generated by corporate journalists who covered the
demonstrations. There was a tremendous surge of optimism and mass protests
against global capitalism following Seattle. The high optimism of that time
seems misplaced given everything that’s happened since 9-11. Nonetheless, the
need for robust independent media is as great as ever.
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