"Edging Away from Anarchy:

Inside the Indymedia Collective,

Passion vs. Pragmatism"

Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review, September 17, 2003

"Who wants to be design coordinator this week?" The question comes from
Nandor, a red-bearded trollish man moderating an evening meeting of New York
City's all-volunteer Independent Media Center. He is composing the table of
contents for the next issue of the collective's biweekly newspaper, the
Indypendent.A pair of fans swish warm air around in the low-ceilinged Manhattan loft.
The thirty members of the print committee sit in a circle beneath an
upside-down American flag and pass around a packet of trail mix. Someone
named Jed, not present at the meeting, is finally nominated to be design
coordinator, partly because no one else seems to want to do it: "What about
Jed? He's unemployed, isn't he?"

The meeting lasts one hour and five minutes; Nandor clocks it on his watch.
Like all things at the center, the process has been precarious, democracy
teetering on the edge of anarchy. There are some rules -– people raise their
hand to speak -– but the collective believes everyone should have his or her
say. Tony wants to report on union labor and summer fashions. Someone else
knows a columnist who has a piece to contribute "It's about the
deportations, but it's really funny." Don, in his seventies and by a few
decades the oldest member of the collective, has an idea for a historical
piece about the Spanish-American War. "It's about how we have been misled
into past wars," he says. Everything makes it in. There is no editor to say
otherwise. At least not yet.

Meetings like this one, experiments in democratic media, have been taking
place all over the world in increasing numbers. New York City's Independent
Media Center is just one piece of the rapidly expanding Indymedia movement,
a four-year-old phenomenon that grew out of the trade protests of the late
1990s, and now encompasses a constellation of about 120 local collectives
from Boston to Bombay. Each collective has a diverse palette of mediums it
uses, including radio, video, print, and the Internet. Each is driven by
political passions its volunteers don't find in the mainstream press, and
each struggles to make the process of covering news as inclusive and
empowering as possible for the community in which it exists.

Although the individual collectives have their political and cultural
idiosyncrasies, they are united through their Web sites. To join the
worldwide collective, a new Independent Media Center must have an online
presence. This is the kernel of the experiment, the clearest expression of
the movement's vision. The concerns and interests of these
activist-journalists are immediately apparent on any of the local Indymedia
sites. Go to the Melbourne, Australia, site, for example, for an article
about aboriginal elders protesting the dumping of nuclear waste on their
land; or to the Washington, D.C., site to read about the USA Patriot Act's
many alleged violations of the Bill of Rights; or to the United Kingdom site
for a piece titled, "New EU Constitution Threatens Free Education."

The sites all have a similar format and feature a newswire that employs a
technology called open publishing. This allows a writer to post a story
directly to the newswire from his or her own computer, without going through
an editor. Using a simple form on the site, you merely paste in your file,
click "Publish," and immediately see a link to your article appear at the
top of the Web site's wire.

The open wire usually appears on the right side of the homepage of the local
sites, while the center column is reserved for particularly relevant stories
off the wire that a committee of volunteers has decided to highlight. The
network of collectives also maintains a global site (www.indymedia.org) that
pulls content from all the local sites. More than any other element of
Indymedia, the accessibility of open publishing has allowed activists from
Brazil to Italy to Israel to Los Angeles to answer the revolutionary demand
that inspired this grass-roots movement: Don't hate the media. Be the media.

But Indymedia volunteers are also learning that being the media is not so
simple. An open, representative form of media may be a worthy ideal, but in
reality is often a messy thing. As the collective evolves, the volunteers
are faced with difficult decisions many members never contemplated – about
their Web site's usefulness, about editorial policy, about money. Whether
they thrive or fade into irrelevance will ultimately depend on how well they
keep their most extreme tendencies at bay. It won't be easy. Pure democracy
can be chaotic, spontaneity can tip into incoherence, absolute independence
might just mean poverty.

At their best, Indymedia Web sites serve as a sort of activist bulletin
board and a space to report on and support a wide range of left-leaning
causes from environmental extremism and anarchism to fair-trade advocacy and
universal health care. One IMC in Urbana, Illinois, for example,
relentlessly reported about the detention of a local pro-Palestinian
activist, Ahmed Bensouda, who was being held by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service after 9/11 for a minor violation. After a few weeks
of constant attention, he was released. Because each posting can be followed
by potentially endless comments, Indymedia sites have also facilitated
difficult debates within the activist community. A graphic photograph posted
on the Prague IMC site of riot police being hit with a Molotov cocktail
during that city's September 2000 International Monetary Fund/World Bank
meeting inspired a contentious online discussion about whether violence was
an acceptable form of resistance.

Indymedia's reporter-activists believe that no journalism is without bias.
They criticize the mainstream media not simply because, in their eyes, the
networks and newspapers work to maintain the status quo, but because they
believe the mainstream's claims to neutrality mask these biases. Indymedia
journalists say they are not afraid to admit their own bias: journalism in
the service of upending the status quo. They make the argument that this
unabashed commitment does not conflict with fairness and accuracy. At many
collectives, Indymedia reporters are advised not to participate in direct
action at protests they are covering. But as a whole, this journalism is
argumentative, angry, and often written without the basic journalistic
concessions to attribution and balance. A recent issue of the Indypendent,
for example, was headlined "Liar!" next to a photo of President Bush.

"The majority of IMC people I know don't believe in objectivity," says Chris
Anderson, twenty-six, a volunteer at the New York City collective. "They
think everyone should have an opinion and make it known. In this way,
Indymedia goes back to the partisan press of the nineteenth century."

Indymedia first went online amid the tear gas and tumult of the Seattle
World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The belief that the mainstream
media were never going to explore deeply the downside of globalization, and
the story of the various groups trying to fight it, had taken root
throughout the mid-'90s. Activists concluded that if they wanted their story
told with nuance and depth, they would have to do it themselves.

Early inspiration came from deep within the jungles of the Chiapas region in
southern Mexico, where Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked leader of the
Zapatista movement, articulated the case for an independent alternative
media. In a videotaped message to a 1997 gathering called the Media and
Democracy Congress, he made the argument that would have the greatest
influence on the founders of Indymedia. "The world of contemporary news is a
world that exists for the VIPs, the very important people," Marcos said.
"Their everyday lives are what is important: if they get married, if they
divorce, if they eat, what clothes they wear and what clothes they take off
these major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear
for a moment when they kill someone, or when they die."

Instead of simply conforming to this reality or becoming paralyzed with
cynicism, Marcos proposed a third option. "To construct a different way to
show the world what is really happening, to have a critical world view, and
to become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit
every corner of this world."

As the WTO meeting neared, a group of Seattle activists began building this
"different way" in a 2,500-square-foot space that was donated to the group
by a local nonprofit housing advocacy group. It became the first Independent
Media Center, a place where reporters could bring their articles, as well as
video and radio reports, to be uploaded to a central Web site.

The activist community in Seattle coalesced around this center. Unlike
previous efforts to coordinate the often fractious groups, the IMC became an
energetic hub of collaboration. "It was like we were high," says Sheri
Herndon, forty-three, one of the founding members of Indymedia. "The right
people came and we plugged them in. And one of the things that was pretty
powerful is that we weren't really fazed about working together. We had a
short-term common goal. The smaller differences, you just let them go."

The use of open publishing made the Seattle Indymedia experiment
revolutionary, even though the original motivation for the technology was
practical. It would take too long to upload all the reporters' accounts
manually in one location. The solution came from an Australian computer
programmer involved with Indymedia who, three weeks before the protests,
adapted an open-source code that enabled the activists to use any computer
to simply post accounts or photographs of what was happening on the streets.
"With open publishing, your experience of the news is different," says Jay
Sand, thirty-one, another of Indymedia's early volunteers. "You really feel
like you were there, even more so than TV. On TV, you are seeing one image
at a time. Real life is more confusing and this comes through on the IMC
site."

The result was a street-level collage of text and image: a photograph of a
legion of police in riot gear. An account of a protester whose nose had just
been broken. A video of the anarchist group Black Bloc smashing the windows
of a Nike store. An analysis of the trade talks over fishing rights
happening that day inside the convention hall. An explanation of the cause
that drove activists to dress up like sea turtles.

Unwittingly, the Indymedia organizers had found a technology that fit
philosophically with their ideas about how to transform the media. Everyone
was now empowered to contribute to the creation of the news.

In the four years since the Seattle protests, it wouldn't be farfetched to
say that Indymedia has become a brand, although that might not be the word
activists would choose. From the time the first Web site was set up,
Independent Media Centers have proliferated at a rapid pace, about one new
one every eleven days. It soon became clear that the Indymedia format was
attractive to activists around the world, not just as a way to cover
protests but as a day-to-day accounting of the local and global concerns of
social-justice and antiglobalization advocates.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the crucial "tech geeks" of the Indymedia
network, has seen Indymedia grow from the Seattle collective to a universal
prototype that can now be found even in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he is
temporarily living. "It blows my mind sometimes how much Indymedia has
spread," Henshaw-Plath says. "In every place I have gone to present
Indymedia, it's not been something I have ever had to convince somebody of.
The first thing people say is, 'We want to start one.'"

The ideal of creating a media source that would be totally inclusive has had
to endure tremendous tests. Open publishing, the purest form of the idea,
has become, in some instances, Indymedia's greatest liability.

The New York City IMC is typical. It was started in the spring of 2000 in
anticipation of that fall's UN Millennium Summit for the world's heads of
state. A space in midtown Manhattan was donated to the group. In the three
years since its founding, the print committee has been dominant, putting out
the 10,000-circulation Indypendent. And the collective has grown
exponentially. Financially, it scrapes by, as most collectives do, by
putting on benefits and selling merchandise like T-shirts and U.S. maps
featuring nuclear power plants and army bases, what the volunteers call the
United States' "infrastructure of terror." The volunteers are also typical
of American IMCs. As John Tarleton, thirty-four, one of the founders of the
New York IMC, who supports himself by picking blueberries during the summer,
says, "Volunteers are mostly in their twenties and thirties, unmarried yet
largely college educated, predominantly white, struggling to make ends meet,
underemployed or unemployed."

The Web site (www.nyc.indymedia.org) became a place were the city's diverse
activist community could inform itself about coming protests and events.
Stories about police brutality or unfair housing laws appeared side-by-side
with leftist political analyses of the war on terrorism. But the site was
also deluged with posts that had nothing to do with the people's struggle;
anti-Semitic rants, racist caricatures, and pornography all competed,
democratically, for space on the wire. Although an editorial board of
volunteers decided what stories to highlight in the center column, the wire
itself became almost unusable. "That wasn't what Indymedia was set up for,"
Tarleton says. "Many people stopped using us as a place to post."

Because the network had grown so fast, there was no process or editorial
principle to mediate what went on the newswire. "Personally, I started out
as a total free-speech libertarian," says Chris Anderson. "My thoughts were
that people were smart enough to know what's trash and what's not. Is it our
business to tell them what is acceptable? Two years later, I was the one
pushing for more moderation of the wire. So I guess there was an evolution,
which does mirror the evolution of the movement."

In response, the collective came up with a compromise of sorts -– a hidden
folder where all unacceptable posts could be dumped without being erased.
Eventually, a policy emerged that defined what was prohibited. This was a
painful process, since it seemed to highlight the tension at the heart of
the Indymedia experiment: Was the site a place for free speech or was it a
place to express the views of the antiglobalization movement? "It is maybe a
slippery slope when you start hiding posts," says Tarleton. "But we are
already heading down a slippery slope when we turn our newswire over to
crackpots."

In the end, a piece of the democratic ideal had to be discarded to save the
rest. But it is a shift that many watching Indymedia from the sidelines saw
as inevitable. Robert McChesney, author of "Rich Media, Poor Democracy,"
says he always believed that "the Indymedia movement is not obliged to be a
movement for every viewpoint under the sun. They need to make tough
editorial decisions, and that's not something to be despondent about. The
problem is not that you have to make decisions. The important thing is that
you make them based on principles that are transparent."

A similar clash of values came in the middle of 2002, when the global
Indymedia network, desperate for funds to maintain aging equipment and to
help local collectives pay rent, was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Ford
Foundation in response to a proposal submitted by a few volunteers. What
should have been a boon to a struggling organization was a cause for
consternation among Indymedia activists. There was no process yet for
reaching a consensus on whether to accept the money and, if it was to be
accepted, how to distribute it. To some extent, the global network –- run by
a committee composed of at least one volunteer from each collective, who
communicate via list-servers in more than a dozen languages -– had outgrown
its founders. As with the creation of the "hidden folder," process generally
followed crisis. Now the network was on the verge of receiving much-needed
resources, and the only decision-making method available was one of passive
consensus, where if no one disagrees, it is assumed everyone agrees.

Suddenly, the democracy so treasured by the network -– now grown to at least
5,000 volunteers -– became its greatest handicap. A number of IMCs outside
the United States, including Brazil, Italy, and Argentina, were opposed to
taking money from the corporate world. Although many of the American
volunteers thought the collective should take the money as long as no
strings were attached, the bitter arguments became too much for the network
to bear. In the end the grant had to be returned because no consensus could
be reached and the debate threatened, as Sascha Meinrath, a volunteer at the
Urbana-Champagne IMC, put it, to "create fissures in the network that would
take years to fix."

Slowly and carefully, Indymedia organizers are beginning to deal with the
internal tensions that made this crisis inevitable. A consensus seems to be
building that Indymedia will survive and grow only if it becomes more
organized, efficient, and useful for the activist community. In the sticky
domain of financial issues, Meinrath has helped form fund-raising group
called the Tactical Media Fund, independent from Indymedia and able to make
decisions without a network-wide consensus.

For the newswire, new technology is being developed by the tech geeks to
make it easier to sift through the information and find the news a reader is
looking for. Instead of deciding which posts are acceptable and which are
not, Indymedia volunteers can be librarians, categorizing posts so that at a
click one can find everything having to do with bioengineering, for example.
The idea is to make the sites easier to use. The next step is to create
themed Indymedia sites (about the economy, Israel-Palestine conflict,
environment, etc.) that would include all related stories funneled from
local sites.

There is a surprising amount of talk about the need to expand the rules and
processes and guidelines that govern Indymedia. "The ideal has not been
abandoned," Chris Anderson insists. "But the great thing about Indymedia
people is that they are not ideologues, they are pragmatists, not hung up on
things. They have ideals but are also very practical."

This flexibility will be necessary to confront the challenges that lie
ahead. IMCs continue to multiply. A group of young Iraqis are trying to set
up one in Baghdad. They have begun work on publishing a newspaper, and
British activists are helping the Iraqis with their Web site. A radio
station in Amman, Jordan, has sent people to get them started in that
medium. All this would have been impossible a few years ago

But to build something truly alternative and useful will require discipline
along with the creative joy that was so manifest that winter in Seattle.
Sheri Herndon, who has observed Indymedia's evolution, was referring to the
content as much as the attitude that drives the network when she said,
"Ultimately, it's not enough for us to talk about what we are against. We
have to articulate what we are for. It's not enough to slow the rate of
destruction. We have to increase the rate of creation."

Gal Beckerman is an assistant editor at CJR.