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This article was originally published in Columbia Journalism Review on November 22, 2024. It has been shortened to fit and lightly edited for style.
At the end of November, 1999, when the World Trade Organization met at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, so many thousands of protesters arrived on the scene that they effectively ended the conference; what ensued became known as the Battle of Seattle. Among the union members, environmentalists, and students who descended on the city was a group of volunteers keen to document the action live, by making use of the newly emerging internet. They were not, strictly speaking, journalists. One was Evan Henshaw-Plath, a coder and activist in his twenties who liked to pick up lefty mags at food coops and Whole Foods; in 1998, he’d created a calendar site called Protest.net. He and his cohort had grown frustrated by what they saw as a recurring problem: demonstrations seemed to receive press coverage only if conflict erupted––a clash with police, property damage, a scuffle with counterprotesters. “The response from journalists, even sympathetic ones, was that they needed a hook,” he recalled. “They needed a story.” As the WTO convened, a group of volunteers set up a makeshift media center, to do reporting of their own; he joined in to provide tech support. “Someone put a laptop with a camera and one of these Ricochet modem things in a heavy backpack,” he said. They set up a video stream of the protests—and of the pepper spray, tear gas, and stun grenades lobbed by police. The posts appeared on a website under the name IndyMedia, reaching more than a million people worldwide.
The site was intended to last only as long as the demonstrations. “The resistance is global,” the opening post went. “The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates.” In the twenty-five years that followed, IndyMedia revealed the extent of that promise well beyond its early bloggers’ imaginations, as it grew into a full-fledged open publishing network of activist journalism, with some two hundred community centers and national and global online hubs. “It connected the development of local journalism that was for and by poor and working people of the Left, and it was able to scale from there,” Todd Wolfson, professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, said. Its rise did not come effortlessly—IndyMedia’s anarchic roots and vast reach at times posed logistical challenges—and the emergence of social media eventually came to displace much of its infrastructure. (Henshaw-Plath became one of the first employees of Twitter, where he adapted IndyMedia’s live feed into the company’s signature product.) Many of the centers have since closed. But to Wolfson and Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania, who jointly run an initiative called the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, IndyMedia still presents the most promising model in recent history for how grassroots community journalism can work. Continue reading →
