What's the Matter with Indymedia?

In the last week of November 1999, a news website run entirely by volunteers was launched. "Don't hate the media; be the media" was the battle cry of hundreds of people who converged in Seattle to bring about the birth of the Independent Media Center (IMC, or Indymedia). The project promised the democratization of the media, and more: "Imperfect, insurgent, sleepless and beautiful, we directly experienced the success of the first IMC in Seattle and saw that the common dream of 'a world in which many worlds fit' is possible," wrote media activist and Seven Stories Press editor Greg Ruggiero. The idea was contagious. Almost 6 years on, there are 149 Indymedia websites in about 45 countries on 6 continents.

The newborn IMC provided the most in-depth and broad-spectrum coverage of the historic direct actions against the World Trade Organization that fall. Despite having no advertising budget, no brand recognition, no corporate sponsorship, and no celebrity reporters, it received 1.5 million hits in its first week--more than CNN got in the same time. Its innovative "open publishing" newswire meant that anyone with computer access could be a reporter. The user-friendly software allowed people to publish directly online, and since more than 450 people got IMC press passes (and scores more reported from their homes), they provided coverage of the historic protests from every block of downtown Seattle. Audio, video, photos, and articles were uploaded at a breathtaking pace. The site embraced the do-it-yourself ethic completely, meaning that there were no restrictive site managers, editors, or word-count limits. At the time, such restrictions seemed dictatorial, oppressive--counterrevolutionary, even. Now, I find them rather appealing.

The open publishing newswire, once filled with breaking stories and photographic evidence refuting government lies, now contains more spam than an old email account. On many sites, it's difficult to find original reporting among the right-wing diatribes and rants about chemtrails poisoning the atmosphere. Coverage of local protests often consists of little more than a few blurry photos of cops doing nothing in particular, without a single line of text explaining the context, the issues, or the goals of the protest. And forget about analysis or investigative reporting. They tend to be as rare on Indymedia as they are on Fox News.

This isn't to suggest that I've avoided Indymedia as a journalist, or that I disagree with its mission--neither are true. I've worked with various IMCs over the years during big protests, mostly as a reporter, and mostly secondarily to the various actions I was involved with. In 1999, I met early on with some of the founders of the first IMC, who wanted an outside perspective on what they were cooking up. In 2001, I covered the Zapatista caravan for the Chiapas, UK, and Seattle sites; later that year I worked in the IMC during the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa, taking phoned-in reports from the streets, confirming them, plotting movements on maps, and posting the news. In Cancún I did support work in the IMC during the 2003 WTO actions, as well as some reporting. In Miami, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests that same year, I reported for the short-lived paper and the website. And last summer in El Alto, Bolivia, I worked with locals on covering an important federal election.

On the anniversary of the Iraq invasion earlier this year, I was in Mexico, trying to get information about antiwar protests around the United States. I looked at IMC sites based in cities where I knew there were actions, and found nothing. Eventually, I found what I was looking for--on the BBC. The experience, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Each time I try and find news among the Indymedia drivel, I ask myself the same question: What happens when--in our attempts not to hate the media but to be it--we end up hating the media we've become?