salaud speaks

like indymedia, the alpha-hackers (did I just say that?) need to create an INTENTIONAL community. This intentional community can choose whether to sell out its space or not.

So… in what one can only think is the shaming of the whOregonian newspaper into running a full-page photo and headline about the “opposing” story about a car giving a bicyclist a hard time, the headline is now “Driver chases Cyclist”… again… forget several times in the last 12 months that “Driver kills cyclist with car”… and forget that days ago we had “Cyclist CLUBS driver with his bike”.

Indymedia is in it for the long haul. More than anything indymedia is, like the rest of the tactics/energy born of the anti-globalization movement, like a dog that caught the car that it was chasing after. It is hard to know what do next when you won. It is obvious that Content Management Systems, open-publishing (including blogs), is an area which indymedia pioneered for the news/media domain. It is a great part of the mission of indymedia to make open-publishing of original reporting, commentary and analysis from the community a big “DUH… of course that’s how news is gather and analyzed.” Well, anyone can look around and see that part of the mission has been accomplished in many ways. Corporate media, anywhere from FoxNews websites/channels to OPB, find themselves pressured by the expectations raised by indymedia tactics to allow “regular folks” to report or aid in the reporting… or at the very least comment and discuss articles/pieces on their sites. Indymedia has generated the expectation of at least an “appearance” of involving community input in almost every corner of the news. In addition, the other main prong of the indymedia mission has been successful in bringing voice to voiceless, by helping people to find their voice, trusting their own writing/reporting and launching their own websites or projects. So, the questions are of the type, “what now?”

When is a hatchet a blunt instrument? Imagine this, if you can: Andre the Giant, Lou Ferrigno, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or more probably one of their incredible fantasy movie characters lifting a 20lb bike over their head and clubbing a poor schmuck repeatedly. Hard to believe….. but, at least possible with the strength of 3 men in one. Incredible perhaps? Well credibility is definitely the issue here. The latest whOregonian full front-page photo and headline reads: “Cyclist clubs driver with his bike”; a very blunt hatchet job. Does anyone remember the full page photos and headlines that they ran every time a biker was killed by a car in Portland: “Driver kills biker with his car” ? No? Well, that’s because they never ran such a headline.