Communications-Related Headlines for January 13, 2000

Headlines Extra:
INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST WRESTLE WITH THE WTO

As the number of daily newspapers continues to dwindle and media companies of all stripe race to consolidate, the Internet is often seen as the last venue in which alternative and independent journalists can have a voice. The potential of non-traditional news sources to offer a diversity of timely, hard-hitting information perhaps reached a peak when the World Trade Organization (WTO) met in Seattle last month.

Hundreds of independent, small, progressive news organizations and individual reporters descended on Seattle in the last days of November to bring the world news about the WTO, free trade and grassroots activism. With new, relatively inexpensive technologies -- including video cameras, Web cams, audio recorders, lap top computers and cell phones -- journalists produced and distributed thousands of stories and images not available from mainstream media.

The hub of much of this new journalism was Seattle's Independent Media Center (IMC) (Indymedia.org), a coalition of activist, journalist, and alternative media organizations that coordinated and disseminated much of the coverage. Free Speech TV hosted IMC's Web site that allowed journalist -- or anyone with access to a Internet-connected computer -- to directly upload their stories. Videographers turned the IMC into a production facility enabling them to churn out daily reports that were transmitted to over 100 public access stations by the national satellite network, Deep Dish TV. Additionally, the IMC produced a daily newspaper that was distributed during the WTO events and World Trade Watch Radio provided daily radio broadcasts of events as they unfolded.

According to media organizers involved with the independent efforts in Seattle, the public was desperate for news it was not getting from the main stream media. "While big broadcasters like CNN and Fox focused almost exclusively on the confrontation between protesters and police, especially the first couple of days, the independent sites provided in-depth papers and research about the WTO, not to mention some fascinating discussion groups where people from both sides of the issues argued the trade questions back and forth for days," wrote Tom Regan in the December 9th edition of the Christian Science Monitor.

Bruce Weil, an IMC coordinator explained that despite the complexity of issues surrounding the WTO, "there was a vacuum when it came to information" about what was stake in the Seattle meetings. A glance at Web sites displaying the work of independent journalist shows hundreds of stories addressing the ramifications of WTO policies on everything from the survival of family farms and availability of public education around the world, to rising the global temperatures caused by ozone depletion.

The WTO may have put the work of independent journalist on the radar screens of many Internet users for the first time. But as events in Seattle and the issues involved are supplanted by stories of media mergers and football play-offs, will people forsake the polished, consistent coverage of the network news for the alternative media sources? The real challenge of alternative news publishers in the post-WTO era, said IMC's Weil, is to create a more refined "front page", while still giving a broad range of voices the ability to contribute. "The progressive media tends to preach to the converted at times," he said. "We need to make our stories more aproachable for thoes people who are not yet converted, but are willing to listen"