Archive | indymedia

Turn to Independent Media for What’s Really Going on in Miami at the FTAA

In case you weren’t aware, I want to point out that there will be thousands of people on the streets of Downtown Miami this week to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit, beginning Thursday. The FTAA is an attempt to bring NAFTA style so-called “free trade” to the entire western hemisphere.

A Miami/FTAA IMC has been set up to provide the resources for independent grassroots coverage of the summit and the protests. Police presence has been incredibly high, with many reports that the cops are targeting protestors and activists for intimidation and harrassment.

As has been the case with recent anti-war protests in DC, and anti-corporate-globalization protests in Italy and Quebec, the police often do not distinguish between protestors, reporters and ordinary citizens, who all become the target of police violence and “non-lethal” weapons. With such an enormous police presence, we shouldn’t be surprised if the cops crack down on the IMC as soon as they can think up an excuse. Independent media reporters expose these strong-arm repressive tactics. That exposure is a threat to any power that relies upon these tactics to maintain power.

In addition to their website, the FTAA IMC has a web radio station set up, with several mirror streams to accomodate lots of listeners. Infoshop.org has also set up a special FTAA page to compile links to reports about the summit and protests from both the alternative and mainstream media.

Nine members of my local Urbana-Champaign IMC have joined the thousands in Miami and will be filing reports by phone and Internet to the U-C IMC website. The IMC’s “home support” crew is staying at the IMC most of the day Thursday and Friday to take calls from our reporters and publish the reports. With luck, I will be airing a live call-in report from some of the reporters during the mediageek radioshow this Friday at 5:30 on WEFT. For those of you outside the listening area, I will try hard to get the program archived here very quickly.

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Documenting Indymedia – The Personal

Rabble is answering questions about his involvement in Indymedia for someone’s thesis and posting his answers on his Anarchogeek blog. He’s keeping his answers necessarily brief, though comprehensive enough to be enlightening for the casual reader, like me.

He’s only 3 questions in (out of 18), but already I think posting his answers on his blog helps provide some needed context and history of the Indymedia movement. What’s nice about these questions and answers is that they don’t attempt to result in a definitive history, but rather the history of one person’s experiences. That’s valuable both by itself, and also within a larger context if more people add their stories.

The power of Indymedia is that it encourages and enables a diversity of stories and responses on the news (and about what the news is) rather than attempting or requiring a single authoritative so-called “objective” version. It is only appropriate and most useful that documentation of Indymedia be similarly diverse, discursive and dynamic.

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Indy Journalism Via Blog

Wired News has a story on a French blogger who posted updated reports about what was really going on in the streets around the G-8, as prostestors and police clashed throughout the weekend. However, I must point out that this is exactly the sort of thing Indymedia has been doing for over three years now — I guess it’s just not as cool as blogging right now. IMC is sooooo 2000.

Like too many Americans, I have to admit that this past weekend’s G8 summit just about passed right by me, even though I followed the news on the special Indymedia newswire set up for the event. Personally, I was too caught up in the FCC nonsense, but should have noted here how important Indymedia was in setting the record straight.

One might recall that two years ago in Genoa Italian police raided a welcome center and the local IMC, beating people as they slept, in addition to shooting dead one protestor. There is good reason to protest and fight such a closed, undemocratic forum as the G8, and independent media figures heavily in revealing the true undemocracy going on.

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Urbana-Champaign Indymedia Center Mostly Open After City Overreacts

After a bit of a scare and quite a bit of wrangling, negotiating and meeting with Urbana city officials the Urbana-Champaign IMC remains mostly open after getting a notice of immediate closure last Thursday. However, the IMC’s all-ages performance venue, known as the “back room,” remains closed, as it was the target of most of the code violations.

On Wednesday night the IMC’s Steering Group drafted a statement that details what happened and what the IMC’s plans are. I’ll post it as soon as the edited and proofread version gets released.

But, in sum, although the IMC has been in constant communication with various Urbana city officials, has had fire inspections, and operated the peformance space in the open for over a year, the City claimed that nobody knew there were public performances going on.

In the aftermath of the fire disasters in Chicago and Rhode Island earlier this year the City of Urbana is understandably skittish about public gathering spaces being up to code. That is why the City decided to do a second inspection of the space after an initial inspection last Monday that yielded only a few violations in need of repair.

But in their apparent rush to deal with a situation they hadn’t been on top of for over a year, city officials overreacted by issuing closure order without even attempting to contact anybody at the IMC. Initial attempts by several IMC volunteers to talk to City officials about the closure last Thursday night and Friday morning met with resistance, and in the case of Urbana’s mayor, outright hositility and violence (he slammed around objects like a tea cup and threw a chair when the IMC’s treasurer came to meet with him Friday morning).

The list of repairs and modification necessary to bring the IMC’s performance space up to code is extensive and largely beyond the means of the IMC. Further complicating things is the fact that several of the violations deal with the whole building, including parts that the IMC doesn’t rent, making them the responsibility of the landlords (who are currently in Australia).

Rather than let this keep us down, however, the IMC is using this as further impetus in our drive to buy a building to permanently house the IMC.

Of course, many folks have wondered over the past week if the City’s action represent some kind of crackdown on the IMC and its independent voice of dissent. Frankly, that’s hard to say. Urbana is a small city — 34,000 people — and a fairly progressive one at that. The IMC has become an active space in an otherwise dying downtown, and there is significant support for the IMC on city council (one member is a founding member of the IMC). Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who dislike or hate the IMC — the mayor certainly falls into this category.

But if the City’s intent was to shut down the IMC, they did a shitty job of it. It appears that folks like the fire and building inspectors really thought they were doing their job, and later they personally expressed some regret that communication hadn’t been better. These City officials have also pledged their cooperation to help the IMC meet all relevant codes in a new space. Beyond the bad publicity of appearing to shut down a non-profit media center, they also risked bad publicity of appearing to suppress having active culture going on in the City’s downtown.

Now, I’m certainly not complacent, and I sure as hell don’t doubt that a pissed of mayor can make our lives difficult, but I also think it’s unproductive to try and find an enemy or fight where there isn’t one. If the IMC were just an all-ages peformance venue, we’d be screwed. But because the IMC also is a multi-faceted media and art center, producing a newspaper, radio program and video, and housing a library and art gallery, I think it has made itself valuable to a diverse bunch of people.

There has been a great deal of community support for our IMC, so we will see if there is enough support to help the IMC buy a permanent space and outfit it to be a real independent community center that will also stand as a permanent automomous zone in the middle of Illinois.

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It’s Time for Indy Journalists To Start Pissing People Off

…It’s time to break some eggs, and get the attention of more of the public, even those who might not give two shits about a protest in DC, and who may not even give two shits about protestors being pre-emptively arrested and brutalized. We don’t have to pander to them — we have to piss them off, get them riled up and thinking about what’s really going on. As it is now, I think too often they don’t even notice. …

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