[Reader-list] Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism

[Harsh Kapoor]

AlterNet
September 17, 2003

Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism
By Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review

Who wants to be design coordinator this week?" The question comes 
from Nandor, a red-bearded trollish man moderating an evening meeting 
of New York City's all-volunteer Independent Media Center. He is 
composing the table of contents for the next issue of the 
collective's biweekly newspaper, the Indypendent.

A pair of fans swish warm air around in the low-ceilinged Manhattan 
loft. The thirty members of the print committee sit in a circle 
beneath an upside-down American flag and pass around a packet of 
trail mix. Someone named Jed, not present at the meeting, is finally 
nominated to be design coordinator, partly because no one else seems 
to want to do it: "What about Jed? He's unemployed, isn't he?"

The meeting lasts one hour and five minutes; Nandor clocks it on his 
watch. Like all things at the center, the process has been 
precarious, democracy teetering on the edge of anarchy. There are 
some rules - people raise their hand to speak - but the collective 
believes everyone should have his or her say. Tony wants to report on 
union labor and summer fashions. Someone else knows a columnist who 
has a piece to contribute "It's about the deportations, but it's 
really funny." Don, in his seventies and by a few decades the oldest 
member of the collective, has an idea for a historical piece about 
the Spanish-American War. "It's about how we have been misled into 
past wars," he says. Everything makes it in. There is no editor to 
say otherwise. At least not yet.

Meetings like this one, experiments in democratic media, have been 
taking place all over the world in increasing numbers. New York 
City's Independent Media Center is just one piece of the rapidly 
expanding Indymedia movement, a four-year-old phenomenon that grew 
out of the trade protests of the late 1990s, and now encompasses a 
constellation of about 120 local collectives from Boston to Bombay. 
Each collective has a diverse palette of mediums it uses, including 
radio, video, print, and the Internet. Each is driven by political 
passions its volunteers don't find in the mainstream press, and each 
struggles to make the process of covering news as inclusive and 
empowering as possible for the community in which it exists.

Although the individual collectives have their political and cultural 
idiosyncrasies, they are united through their Web sites. To join the 
worldwide collective, a new Independent Media Center must have an 
online presence. This is the kernel of the experiment, the clearest 
expression of the movement's vision. The concerns and interests of 
these activist-journalists are immediately apparent on any of the 
local Indymedia sites. Go to the Melbourne, Australia, site, for 
example, for an article about aboriginal elders protesting the 
dumping of nuclear waste on their land; or to the Washington, D.C., 
site to read about the USA Patriot Act's many alleged violations of 
the Bill of Rights; or to the United Kingdom site for a piece titled, 
"New EU Constitution Threatens Free Education."

The sites all have a similar format and feature a newswire that 
employs a technology called open publishing. This allows a writer to 
post a story directly to the newswire from his or her own computer, 
without going through an editor. Using a simple form on the site, you 
merely paste in your file, click "Publish," and immediately see a 
link to your article appear at the top of the Web site's wire.

The open wire usually appears on the right side of the homepage of 
the local sites, while the center column is reserved for particularly 
relevant stories off the wire that a committee of volunteers has 
decided to highlight. The network of collectives also maintains a 
global site (www.indymedia.org) that pulls content from all the local 
sites. More than any other element of Indymedia, the accessibility of 
open publishing has allowed activists from Brazil to Italy to Israel 
to Los Angeles to answer the revolutionary demand that inspired this 
grass-roots movement: Don't hate the media. Be the media.

But Indymedia volunteers are also learning that being the media is 
not so simple. An open, representative form of media may be a worthy 
ideal, but in reality is often a messy thing. As the collective 
evolves, the volunteers are faced with difficult decisions many 
members never contemplated - about their Web site's usefulness, about 
editorial policy, about money. Whether they thrive or fade into 
irrelevance will ultimately depend on how well they keep their most 
extreme tendencies at bay. It won't be easy. Pure democracy can be 
chaotic, spontaneity can tip into incoherence, absolute independence 
might just mean poverty.

At their best, Indymedia Web sites serve as a sort of activist 
bulletin board and a space to report on and support a wide range of 
left-leaning causes from environmental extremism and anarchism to 
fair-trade advocacy and universal health care. One IMC in Urbana, 
Illinois, for example, relentlessly reported about the detention of a 
local pro-Palestinian activist, Ahmed Bensouda, who was being held by 
the Immigration and Naturalization Service after 9/11 for a minor 
violation. After a few weeks of constant attention, he was released. 
Because each posting can be followed by potentially endless comments, 
Indymedia sites have also facilitated difficult debates within the 
activist community. A graphic photograph posted on the Prague IMC 
site of riot police being hit with a Molotov cocktail during that 
city's September 2000 International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting 
inspired a contentious online discussion about whether violence was 
an acceptable form of resistance.

Indymedia's reporter-activists believe that no journalism is without 
bias. They criticize the mainstream media not simply because, in 
their eyes, the networks and newspapers work to maintain the status 
quo, but because they believe the mainstream's claims to neutrality 
mask these biases. Indymedia journalists say they are not afraid to 
admit their own bias: journalism in the service of upending the 
status quo. They make the argument that this unabashed commitment 
does not conflict with fairness and accuracy. At many collectives, 
Indymedia reporters are advised not to participate in direct action 
at protests they are covering. But as a whole, this journalism is 
argumentative, angry, and often written without the basic 
journalistic concessions to attribution and balance. A recent issue 
of the Indypendent, for example, was headlined "Liar!" next to a 
photo of President Bush.

"The majority of IMC people I know don't believe in objectivity," 
says Chris Anderson, twenty-six, a volunteer at the New York City 
collective. "They think everyone should have an opinion and make it 
known. In this way, Indymedia goes back to the partisan press of the 
nineteenth century."

Indymedia first went online amid the tear gas and tumult of the 
Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The belief that 
the mainstream media were never going to explore deeply the downside 
of globalization, and the story of the various groups trying to fight 
it, had taken root throughout the mid-'90s. Activists concluded that 
if they wanted their story told with nuance and depth, they would 
have to do it themselves.

Early inspiration came from deep within the jungles of the Chiapas 
region in southern Mexico, where Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked 
leader of the Zapatista movement, articulated the case for an 
independent alternative media. In a videotaped message to a 1997 
gathering called the Media and Democracy Congress, he made the 
argument that would have the greatest influence on the founders of 
Indymedia. "The world of contemporary news is a world that exists for 
the VIPs, the very important people," Marcos said. "Their everyday 
lives are what is important: if they get married, if they divorce, if 
they eat, what clothes they wear and what clothes they take off these 
major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear 
for a moment when they kill someone, or when they die."

Instead of simply conforming to this reality or becoming paralyzed 
with cynicism, Marcos proposed a third option. "To construct a 
different way to show the world what is really happening, to have a 
critical world view, and to become interested in the truth of what 
happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this world."

As the WTO meeting neared, a group of Seattle activists began 
building this "different way" in a 2,500-square-foot space that was 
donated to the group by a local nonprofit housing advocacy group. It 
became the first Independent Media Center, a place where reporters 
could bring their articles, as well as video and radio reports, to be 
uploaded to a central Web site.

The activist community in Seattle coalesced around this center. 
Unlike previous efforts to coordinate the often fractious groups, the 
IMC became an energetic hub of collaboration. "It was like we were 
high," says Sheri Herndon, forty-three, one of the founding members 
of Indymedia. "The right people came and we plugged them in. And one 
of the things that was pretty powerful is that we weren't really 
fazed about working together. We had a short-term common goal. The 
smaller differences, you just let them go."

The use of open publishing made the Seattle Indymedia experiment 
revolutionary, even though the original motivation for the technology 
was practical. It would take too long to upload all the reporters' 
accounts manually in one location. The solution came from an 
Australian computer programmer involved with Indymedia who, three 
weeks before the protests, adapted an open-source code that enabled 
the activists to use any computer to simply post accounts or 
photographs of what was happening on the streets. "With open 
publishing, your experience of the news is different," says Jay Sand, 
thirty-one, another of Indymedia's early volunteers. "You really feel 
like you were there, even more so than TV. On TV, you are seeing one 
image at a time. Real life is more confusing and this comes through 
on the IMC site."

The result was a street-level collage of text and image: a photograph 
of a legion of police in riot gear. An account of a protester whose 
nose had just been broken. A video of the anarchist group Black Bloc 
smashing the windows of a Nike store. An analysis of the trade talks 
over fishing rights happening that day inside the convention hall. An 
explanation of the cause that drove activists to dress up like sea 
turtles.

Unwittingly, the Indymedia organizers had found a technology that fit 
philosophically with their ideas about how to transform the media. 
Everyone was now empowered to contribute to the creation of the news.

In the four years since the Seattle protests, it wouldn't be 
farfetched to say that Indymedia has become a brand, although that 
might not be the word activists would choose. From the time the first 
Web site was set up, Independent Media Centers have proliferated at a 
rapid pace, about one new one every eleven days. It soon became clear 
that the Indymedia format was attractive to activists around the 
world, not just as a way to cover protests but as a day-to-day 
accounting of the local and global concerns of social-justice and 
antiglobalization advocates.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the crucial "tech geeks" of the Indymedia 
network, has seen Indymedia grow from the Seattle collective to a 
universal prototype that can now be found even in Montevideo, 
Uruguay, where he is temporarily living. "It blows my mind sometimes 
how much Indymedia has spread," Henshaw-Plath says. "In every place I 
have gone to present Indymedia, it's not been something I have ever 
had to convince somebody of. The first thing people say is, 'We want 
to start one.'"

The ideal of creating a media source that would be totally inclusive 
has had to endure tremendous tests. Open publishing, the purest form 
of the idea, has become, in some instances, Indymedia's greatest 
liability.

The New York City IMC is typical. It was started in the spring of 
2000 in anticipation of that fall's UN Millennium Summit for the 
world's heads of state. A space in midtown Manhattan was donated to 
the group. In the three years since its founding, the print committee 
has been dominant, putting out the 10,000-circulation Indypendent. 
And the collective has grown exponentially. Financially, it scrapes 
by, as most collectives do, by putting on benefits and selling 
merchandise like T-shirts and U.S. maps featuring nuclear power 
plants and army bases, what the volunteers call the United States' 
"infrastructure of terror." The volunteers are also typical of 
American IMCs. As John Tarleton, thirty-four, one of the founders of 
the New York IMC, who supports himself by picking blueberries during 
the summer, says, "Volunteers are mostly in their twenties and 
thirties, unmarried yet largely college educated, predominantly 
white, struggling to make ends meet, underemployed or unemployed."

The Web site (www.nyc.indymedia.org) became a place were the city's 
diverse activist community could inform itself about coming protests 
and events. Stories about police brutality or unfair housing laws 
appeared side-by-side with leftist political analyses of the war on 
terrorism. But the site was also deluged with posts that had nothing 
to do with the people's struggle; anti-Semitic rants, racist 
caricatures, and pornography all competed, democratically, for space 
on the wire. Although an editorial board of volunteers decided what 
stories to highlight in the center column, the wire itself became 
almost unusable. "That wasn't what Indymedia was set up for," 
Tarleton says. "Many people stopped using us as a place to post."

Because the network had grown so fast, there was no process or 
editorial principle to mediate what went on the newswire. 
"Personally, I started out as a total free-speech libertarian," says 
Chris Anderson. "My thoughts were that people were smart enough to 
know what's trash and what's not. Is it our business to tell them 
what is acceptable? Two years later, I was the one pushing for more 
moderation of the wire. So I guess there was an evolution, which does 
mirror the evolution of the movement."

In response, the collective came up with a compromise of sorts - a 
hidden folder where all unacceptable posts could be dumped without 
being erased. Eventually, a policy emerged that defined what was 
prohibited. This was a painful process, since it seemed to highlight 
the tension at the heart of the Indymedia experiment: Was the site a 
place for free speech or was it a place to express the views of the 
antiglobalization movement? "It is maybe a slippery slope when you 
start hiding posts," says Tarleton. "But we are already heading down 
a slippery slope when we turn our newswire over to crackpots."

In the end, a piece of the democratic ideal had to be discarded to 
save the rest. But it is a shift that many watching Indymedia from 
the sidelines saw as inevitable. Robert McChesney, author of "Rich 
Media, Poor Democracy," says he always believed that "the Indymedia 
movement is not obliged to be a movement for every viewpoint under 
the sun. They need to make tough editorial decisions, and that's not 
something to be despondent about. The problem is not that you have to 
make decisions. The important thing is that you make them based on 
principles that are transparent."

A similar clash of values came in the middle of 2002, when the global 
Indymedia network, desperate for funds to maintain aging equipment 
and to help local collectives pay rent, was awarded a $50,000 grant 
from the Ford Foundation in response to a proposal submitted by a few 
volunteers. What should have been a boon to a struggling organization 
was a cause for consternation among Indymedia activists. There was no 
process yet for reaching a consensus on whether to accept the money 
and, if it was to be accepted, how to distribute it. To some extent, 
the global network - run by a committee composed of at least one 
volunteer from each collective, who communicate via list-servers in 
more than a dozen languages - had outgrown its founders. As with the 
creation of the "hidden folder," process generally followed crisis. 
Now the network was on the verge of receiving much-needed resources, 
and the only decision-making method available was one of passive 
consensus, where if no one disagrees, it is assumed everyone agrees.

Suddenly, the democracy so treasured by the network - now grown to at 
least 5,000 volunteers - became its greatest handicap. A number of 
IMCs outside the United States, including Brazil, Italy, and 
Argentina, were opposed to taking money from the corporate world. 
Although many of the American volunteers thought the collective 
should take the money as long as no strings were attached, the bitter 
arguments became too much for the network to bear. In the end the 
grant had to be returned because no consensus could be reached and 
the debate threatened, as Sascha Meinrath, a volunteer at the 
Urbana-Champagne IMC, put it, to "create fissures in the network that 
would take years to fix."

Slowly and carefully, Indymedia organizers are beginning to deal with 
the internal tensions that made this crisis inevitable. A consensus 
seems to be building that Indymedia will survive and grow only if it 
becomes more organized, efficient, and useful for the activist 
community. In the sticky domain of financial issues, Meinrath has 
helped form fund-raising group called the Tactical Media Fund, 
independent from Indymedia and able to make decisions without a 
network-wide consensus.

For the newswire, new technology is being developed by the tech geeks 
to make it easier to sift through the information and find the news a 
reader is looking for. Instead of deciding which posts are acceptable 
and which are not, Indymedia volunteers can be librarians, 
categorizing posts so that at a click one can find everything having 
to do with bioengineering, for example. The idea is to make the sites 
easier to use. The next step is to create themed Indymedia sites 
(about the economy, Israel-Palestine conflict, environment, etc.) 
that would include all related stories funneled from local sites.

There is a surprising amount of talk about the need to expand the 
rules and processes and guidelines that govern Indymedia. "The ideal 
has not been abandoned," Chris Anderson insists. "But the great thing 
about Indymedia people is that they are not ideologues, they are 
pragmatists, not hung up on things. They have ideals but are also 
very practical."

This flexibility will be necessary to confront the challenges that 
lie ahead. IMCs continue to multiply. A group of young Iraqis are 
trying to set up one in Baghdad. They have begun work on publishing a 
newspaper, and British activists are helping the Iraqis with their 
Web site. A radio station in Amman, Jordan, has sent people to get 
them started in that medium. All this would have been impossible a 
few years ago

But to build something truly alternative and useful will require 
discipline along with the creative joy that was so manifest that 
winter in Seattle. Sheri Herndon, who has observed Indymedia's 
evolution, was referring to the content as much as the attitude that 
drives the network when she said, "Ultimately, it's not enough for us 
to talk about what we are against. We have to articulate what we are 
for. It's not enough to slow the rate of destruction. We have to 
increase the rate of creation."

Gal Beckerman is an assistant editor at CJR.