Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism

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.