Thank You Urbana-Champaign Sustainers and Readers
From the Editors and Facilitators of the Public i
This is the 10th anniversary issue of the Public i and we want to thank all of those who have made this paper possible. These include the founders and sustainers of the Independent Media Center and the paper itself, all of the people who have worked on the production and distribution of the paper, all our authors, our readers, and the businesses and other organizations that have made space to distribute our papers in their establishments.
The IMC and the Public i were founded after a number of Champaign-Urbana community members attended the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization’s meetings in Seattle. These folks came home convinced that the commercial media’s presentations were extremely biased. Police attacks against protesters and journalists at the G8 meetings in Genoa, Italy in July of 2001 further solidified their conviction that what was needed in the US and abroad was media with international, national, and local foci that was independent of the dominant economic and political power structures.
What grew out of this conviction was powerful. To see the very first of our efforts, readers can visit the Public i website, where they will find four dispatches from the events in Genoa. These stories appeared only on the web. The first actual print issue of the Public i came out the following month, August 2001 with fourteen local writers making contributions. From that date to the issue that you are now reading, we have published over 900 articles; almost all of these written by current or former members of the Urbana-Champaign community with additions from IMC organizations around the country. We’ve had authors ranging in age from the middle school years to retirees (and in between), and our oldest contributor to date is in his seventies!
The topics we cover are wide-ranging and have included: national and international politics, human rights, education, labor and economics, health care, the environment, the arts, food, sports, and issues of concern to people of color, women, youth, and the LGBT community. As one might imagine in a university community, there has been considerable turnover in the editor/facilitator group, but several of the original people have hung in with us.
We want to offer special thanks to our longstanding financial sustainers:
- World Harvest International and Gourmet Foods
- Champaign County AFL-CIO
- Progressive Asset Management, Financial West Group
- The Jerusalem Café
- That’s Rentertainment
- The Campus Faculty Association
- The Natural Gourmet
- Socialist Forum
- Milo’s Restaurant. and
- The Graduate Students’ Association (GEO)
And, to our newest sustaine:
- Strawberry Fields, and
- The Common Ground Food Co-op
We are very grateful to these sustainers and hope that the quality of our work has met their, and the community’s, standards. We invite any other interested organizations and businesses to become sustainers as we enter our second decade of publication. And we invite everyone in the community to join us in our work of writing, producing, and distributing the paper.
THANK YOU ALL SO VERY MUCH.