Breaking Through The Information Blockade 

Who knew Seattle would begin a media revolution? When the World Trade Organization met in the espresso capital of the US in November 1999, hundreds of journalists and thousands of protesters converged on the city. The journalists represented, by and large, a handful of corporate media organizations, while the protesters represented a diverse group of interests with complaints against the WTO and its policies. Concerned that the major news organizations would fail to cover the WTO protests adequately, if at all, a group of Seattle media activists decided on a proactive approach. Months prior to the WTO meeting, they formed the Independent Media Center, and set about gathering donations and organizing volunteers. They registered a Website and set up a newsroom with computers, Internet lines, digital editing systems and streaming audio and video.

When the WTO showed up, Indymedia offered volunteer journalists a place to file stories, photos and videos of the protests, and upload them to the Web. As Indymedia's behind-the-scenes reports of the protests came online, "an amazing thing happened," reported the Christian Science Monitor. "In an end run around traditional media, the Internet became the key player in dispersing information to a world hungry for details about the events in Seattle."

Two years later, there are now over 60 Independent Media Centers scattered across 20 countries and six continents, each dedicated to providing a progressive counterpoint to the mainstream press. From grassroots beginnings in Seattle, this online alternative to corporate media has spread like wildfire. Not bad for a loose collection of non-profit, volunteer-staffed journalists and activists.

Opposition to corporate ownership of the media

"We had a saying in Seattle," one Indymedia journalist said, "we're trying to break through the information blockade" that results from corporate control of news reporting. The issue of corporate ownership of the news media is a hot topic for scholars and media observers. The respected Columbia Journalism Review has followed media ownership patterns for years, and their website features a "Who Owns What" section (www.cjr.org) dedicated to keeping track of media ownership. Media critics in academia and public interest groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) have long observed that "as news outlets fall into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries, conflicts of interest inevitably interfere with newsgathering."

Ben Bagdikian, a leading scholar on the topic, has been studying corporate news ownership for decades. In his 1982 book, The Media Monopoly, he reported that 50 corporations owned half or more of the media business. By the early 1990s, that number was trimmed to 20, and is now well under 10. With such ownership comes bias, and news content now reflects a narrow "range of politics and social values from center to far right," Bagdikian writes, leaving the American audience with a press that covers "a narrowing range of ideas."

Corporate ownership, to Bagdikian, "is no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say that it is no way to maintain a democracy."

This has resulted in what the Columbia Journalism Review has called a "media backlash." Rachel Coen, a media analyst for FAIR, thinks corporate bias in coverage has led many to draw "some connections between globalization and corporate-owned media." A specific response to this disaffection has been the development and rapid growth of the Independent Media Centers.

Given the nature of corporate media bias, can a reader expect news from an Indymedia site to be any more objective? Indymedia addresses this directly: "All reporters have their own biases. . .corporations that own media entities have their own biases as well, and often impose their views on their reporters (or their reporters self-censor to conform their own biases to those of their employer). You should look at all reports you read on the Indymedia site with a critical eye, just as you should look at all media before you in a discerning manner."

Birth and development

When the WTO came to Seattle, press coverage included, for the first time, a fully operational and well-planned Independent Media Center. Led by organizer Dan Merkle, a host of alternative news agencies, including Free Speech TV, Protest.net, Paper Tiger TV, Deep Dish TV, joined forces to form Indymedia. Working with $30,borrowed equipment, Indymedia turned a downtown storefront into a bustling, high-tech newsroom filled with computers, Internet access, and their own website (www.Indymedia.org). Other groups provided streaming audio, while a digital video editing system was installed to edit reports for satellite feed. As one local organizer gleefully admitted, the WTO's choice of Seattle as a meeting place helped birth the Indymedia: "I mean, it's Seattle -- we've got all the techies you'd ever want and all these companies specializing in everything they need to stream these stories all over the world."

When the protesters hit the streets, Indymedia became the nerve center for an army of volunteer journalists, issuing press passes and giving them an online outlet to file their reports. Indymedia received almost immediate attention, and their website received over a million hits during and immediately after the Seattle protests. The Nation correspondent Stephanie Greenwood dropped by their newsroom during the protests and found the Indymedia newsroom "full of committed people doing really good documentary work and reporting. . .Something is starting."

By successfully doing an "end-run around the information gatekeepers," John Tarleton wrote in Nieman Reports, Indymedia's success wasn't confined to creating "one more alternative lefty publication." Rather, they had created "the infrastructure for a multimedia peoples' newsroom" that would reach a global audience "without having to go through the corporate filter." This was grassroots Web journalism at an unprecedented level.

The spread of Indymedia

By February 2000, Indymedias were being established in cities like Washington, Antwerp, Philadelphia, Portland, and Vancouver. By the end of the year 2000, over 30 Indymedias were scattered across the globe, and the number is now over 60. Cities with an activist movement or those anticipating meetings and protests were prime candidates for an Indymedia, and the www.Indymedia.org website provides guidelines and a technical infrastructure for those interested in starting a local office.

What makes the concept of Indymedias different than many online alternative news sources is their focus on grassroots reporting and online publication. While other online alternative news sources often fill their webpages with editorials, commentaries, and news analysis, Indymedia's primary emphasis is providing an outlet for filing original, first-hand coverage online through print, photos, audio, and video.

It's all facilitated through an impressive technical help network and infrastructure. The main Indymedia website provides a wealth of technical information and support for local branches and reporters. A detailed "Tech FAQ" answers most questions, and other detailed pages discuss such topics as website maintenance, information access, downloading stories, and using streaming media.

When the first Indymedia opened in Seattle, stories were published on the Web with little editorial oversight. Following an "open posting" policy, anyone could file a report. As the movement developed, Indymedia staffers noticed that reports varied in quality. Soon "there was a fairly standard newsroom in operation, "the American Journalism Review observed. Stories are ranked by a group of readers, and the ones deemed most newsworthy appear as leading stories, while the rest end up in a separate "open publishing" column. This editorial system, which is hotly contested on Indymedia mailing lists, seems best stated by one British Indymedia member who claimed that the issue for Indymedias wasn't free speech per se as much as "how our speech can be used to create a sustainable and equitable society." In the end, quality stories take precedence over inferior ones.

Indymedia at work

A visit to the Indymedia main webpage (www.Indymedia.org) in late October shows an active, dynamic presentation of news. Below the top banner are three columns, with the center column featuring the main stories. The lead story was ongoing coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, headlined "9-11: Peace & Justice." Following that were stories about battles in Bolivia between farmers and the government and an extensive story on how "fighting terrorism" has meant suppression of civil liberties around the world. Next were reports on large protests in Belgium, Canada, and Norway. Each story is extensively hyperlinked to Indymedia field reports and other news sources. The articles from Bolivia and Europe feature street reports from the protest front, while the ongoing coverage of the September 11 attacks features a backfile of Indymedia reports and analysis. A column on the right has links to upcoming international events that Indymedias will be covering, as well as a list of "open publishing" articles -- items submitted by individuals that reflect a myriad of views, mostly liberal. A column on the left features a search engine, links to all the Indymedia local sites, and links to technical and organizational sections of the webpage.

Most of the local Indymedia offices feature a similar interface and alternative news philosophy as the main webpage. The Israeli Indymedia, for instance, provides English, Arabic, and Hebrew pages. Articles in the center column offered a different perspective from what the mainstream US press presents of Israeli politics and life. Articles included a critique of the Israeli government's military oppression of Palestinians, a report on the cruel treatment of Israeli conscientious objectors, several critiques of US policy in the Middle East, and other views not normally presented by American news sources. Along the right column were "open" postings, again in three languages.

While Independent Media Centers first gained international attention in Seattle, they've also caught the mainstream press's eye in various other places. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, the Philadelphia Indymedia received national press coverage as an alternative to corporate media. Indymedia's coverage of the violence at the G8 meeting in Genoa in summer of 2000 -- some of it aimed at Indymedia itself -- was documented by an Indymedia video journalist, and broadcast worldwide on the Web. In the short time since their birth, Indymedia websites have been growing in popularity, providing "a fuller record" of the news than that of the "mainstream media," according to The Guardian of London. Indymedias are earning respect for providing what one academic journal dubbed "important and pretty damned thrilling" alternative coverage of the news.

Impact

While criticism of corporate media has been growing, Independent Media Centers have actively covered alternative viewpoints, and have successfully used the Web to broadcast news. Using information technologies in a fashion unforeseen by the corporate world, the rapidly growing number of Independent Media Centers are providing an outlet for scores of disaffected and disenfranchised groups to report differing versions of the news than the mainstream press. Activists, journalists, and academics have all commented on this movement. Writing in Dissent, sociologist Jackie Smith notes that Indymedia's "ongoing critical commentary on local and global events" is in the forefront of a larger "dialectic between cyber subversion and the growing concentration of power that shape the politics of the new millennium."

On one side of this dialectic are corporations and corporate-owned media, criticized by Harvard's Nieman Reports for defining "the narrow parameters that actually are put forth for public debate. Every notion that falls outside of those parameters, such as the possibility for universal health care. . .is generally derided or ignored by the mainstream press." On the other side are Independent Media Centers and the diverse communities they represent. While Indymedia won't replace the mainstream press any time soon, they are growing at an impressive rate. They will continue to research their stories, cover issues aggressively, and take time to report on issues shunned by the mainstream press. Indymedias and the communities they represent are a force to contend with, because as the Columbia Journalism Review observed, they're "organized, they're global, and they're not going away."

Gene Hyde is a librarian and a graduate student in Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee. *