The Rise of Independent Media Centers

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Online Journalism Review has a thoughtful piece that looks at the intersection of mass media, democracy, and technology. The Independent Media Centers are the nodes where this all happens. It's interesting that this article is written from the point of view of the journalism profession. I wonder what bloggers would say? Or the social activists who are making the news thanks to this and similar new media. See Modern Day Muckrakers: The Rise of the Independent Media Center Movement."

from the article

[nomadic]

Like Wells, the reporters connected to the IMCs don't have any interest in unbiased reporting. But many of their articles do contain, like her work, massive amounts of research, statistics and interviews. Media, they believe, should be accessible to everyone. Journalists can and should be agents for social change.

This is the problem with the mainstream media today; exchanging one form of bias for another doesn't exactly sound like an advance.

Re:from the article

[mfb]

All journalists, and all journals, are inherently biased. No single reporter or editor can hope to compile even an approximation of "truth," in its totality, for her or his readers.

Due to its ownership, most mass media around the world has either a corporate bias (the global big-6 media monopolies [mediachannel.org] are more beholden to their shareholders and advertisers than to the public interest) or government bias (totalitarian nations and state-sponsored media outlets). Even non-profit and non-commercial media outlets suffer from the whims of their donors and owners.

The philosophies behind the IMC network is that technology and the open-publishing model are expanding media-access for everyone: the poor, the under-educated, activists, advocacy groups, fringe dissidents, working people - anyone. Meanwhile, the "consensus" process allows each IMC editorial collective to put together featured content that all participants endorse and stand behind (or, at least, stand aside). This still-experimental paradigm is radically different from the hierarchical editorial structure of corporate and government media.

Re:from the article

[Xavier Shirin]

As it has always been, and probably always will be, you cannot expect to get an unbiased view from one source. In order to get any approximation of an unbiased view, you have to look at many views and determine which parts of them are truth and which parts are bias. Then you will see the larger part, but not the entire, truth.

Re:from the article

[DerekLyons]

All journalists, and all journals, are inherently biased. No single reporter or editor can hope to compile even an approximation of "truth," in its totality, for her or his readers.

Once upon a time however, you *knew* the bias of a particular paper. This one was Democratic, that one Republican, etc..

speaking of which,

[fonebone]

this brings up another question.. it's so commonly mentioned how these great random freelancing web journalists are changing the media by bringing unbiased news, and that sort of thing. we all know about the usual indy medias [indymedia.org], but what other independant journalists have really proved themselves to be something insightful and accurate?

open publishing

[solferino]

featured article includes a link
to another document entitled

open publishing is the same as free software [cat.org.au]

this piece is a little bit fluffy (ok a lot), and gets some details wrong (equating free software to open source for example) but has some interesting rhetoric, vis :

Media corporations assume the viewers are stupid. In their eyes the total creative potential of the audience is Funniest Home Videos. Creative people do not buy more stuff, they make their own. This is a problem for media multinationals. They do not trust their audience to be creative. It might be bad for profits, bad for executive salaries.

...

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.

...

Open publishing is not new. It is an electronic reinvention of the ancient art of story telling.

and finally a reference to slashdot :

Note that while slashdot.org has many open publishing features, and was an important inspiration for open publishing, I don't think it really is open publishing. Significantly, the stories (as opposed to the comments) are taken from reader contributions, but are processed behind closed doors.

not news to us :(

the rise of indy-media

[sulli]

like this crap [slashdot.org]?

Learning takes hard work.

[Fantastic Lad]

People who want to be able to trust a single or very small number of popular news sources for their information are either lazy, ignorant or just don't care.

And that's fine. That's a valid choice.

Although, dealing with people of this nature can be frustrating as hell! Still, it's pointless to argue such matters with those who are more interested in maintaining comfortable illusions than they are in struggling for real knowledge.

For those, however, who do find themselves on the path of personal growth, independant news sources can provide a slice of un-polished data which, while often unprofessional, poorly researched, (or plain raving mad), when cross examined, can prove to be very useful for gleaning new facts and ideas.

-Fantastic Lad