Indymedia

The Indymedia logo: A lowercase, italic i with three waves expanding out on the left and right.

The Independent Media Center, also called Indymedia or the IMC, is a network of media organizations and journalists. It was started in late November, 1999, to cover the protests of the anti-globalization movement against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington. By 2002, there were 89 local IMCs around the world spread between 31 countries plus the West Bank and 6 continents. The country with the most IMCs is the United States with 39, followed by Canada with 11.

A current list of all IMC websites should be located in the lower-left column of every IMC website, on at least the homepage (e.g., www.indymedia.org).

Introduction

IMCs produce print, audio, and video journalism, but are most well known for their open publishing newswires: internet weblog sites where anyone with internet access can publish information.

The content of an IMC is determined by its participants; this contrasts with the majority of past and present "alternative" and "mainstream" media organisations, which are generally led by relatively small, closed groups that determine content from the top of an editorial hierarchy. Some proponents of the Indymedia concept argue that IMCs are not popular because of a few well-regarded journalists and commentators, but rather because they allow the direct participation of all, encouraging users to "be the media".

Between 1999 and 2001, IMC newswires tended to be focused on up-to-the-minute coverage of protest: from local demonstrations to summits where anti-globalization movement protests were occurring. As the IMC has grown, though, users have added more news and analysis, with strong biases in favour of first-hand news regarding corporations, regarding the whole range of human rights (including social and economic rights, such as the right to housing and jobs, which are often seen as leftist human rights, as well as political rights, such as the right not to be arrested, tortured, or killed for one's political viewpoint, which are often seen as rightist human rights), and regarding the natural environment. The coverage is often unique: for example, during the economic/political crises in Argentina in 2001 and 2002, many of the groups and individuals which helped in opposing the government used the IMC as a place to publish information regarding their activities and pictures from the protests.

The IMCs' open newswires have generated some controversy. For example, in early May 2003, after receiving numerous complaints about newswire stories that referred to the Israeli military (IDF) as "Zionazi forces" (example) or to Israeli Zionists as "Zionazis" (example), Google decided to stop including some IMCs in Google News searches (many non-English IMCs remained in the search). This spawned a petition which sought to promise that content the Indymedia community finds offensive will be removed in the future. The IMCs are still included in normal Google searches, however.

There have been complaints and discussion of innumerable other posts, as has been the nature of open publishing from the early usenet to the present. Notably, however, there has been no similar outcry concerning posts of an anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab nature, by Google or any other organization.

A California man once confessed to having murdered a police officer on www.indybay.org. His motive was to bring attention "to, and halt, the police-state tactics that have come to be used throughout our country.". The first reactions from readers was for one person to support the murderers actions, others both condoned and condemed his actions, and still others who had never been to Red Bluff and had no knowledge of the cop said he had been a child molester.

http://www.sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/1545326.php

Structure

Local IMC collectives are expected to be open and inclusive of individual members of a variety of different local left-wing, right-wing, anarchist and other activist organizations, whether or not these have any overt political labels, so that even those without internet access can participate both in content creation and in content consumption. However, editorial policies, openly and locally chosen by any indymedia collective, generally involve the hiding of articles which promote racism, sexism, homophobia, or other categories of discrimination, so some people feel that Indymedia is left-wing and anarchist and discourages right-wing articles or individuals.

The structure is non-hierarchical in terms of political power relationships, though there do exist de facto hierarchies, due either to control over physical resources (e.g. servers); access to funds; accuracy determination; the fact that certain "global" functions are needed; or simply because it makes sense to coordinate within geographically close regions, without any formal link to geographical borders. However, the existence of numerous redundant communication channels (such as publicly archived mailing lists lists.indymedia.org, wiki pages and local face-to-face meetings) makes it difficult for those at the top of these limited hierarchies to have much coercive power.

All Indymedia collectives are expected to have a locally chosen, but thoroughly discussed, editorial policy for determining features for the center column of the local site. They also have to find ways of dealing with deliberate vandalism.

As they have grown and matured, Indymedia collectives have developed diverse methods of internal formal and informal self-governance. The general principles of non-hierarchical structure and consensus-based decision-making have resulted in an array of organizational models.

As an example of different models for collective internal organizing, the DC IMC (one of the older IMCs in the network) adopted a different and more formal model of organizing as a Coop. Members pay small monthly dues (waived for any who need it to be) and put labor into a volunteer task of some sort that helps with the day-to-day needs of the coop. In contrast, other IMC local collectives are totally informal without any formally-defined membership and very minimal policy and organizational structures.

Some feel that membership includes only those actively doing organizing or other IMC work, while some feel that it actually extends to every IMC participant, from techies to facilitators to media-makers to users commenting on an article. That is, the concept that Indymedia is comprised of its thousands of media-makers, in addition to those doing infrastructure work such as keeping the servers online.

The Indymedia community's strive for non-hierarchical organization has caused numerous conflicts and tensions, which are perhaps more apparent to observers given the transparent nature of the IMC; that is, relative to traditional closed, hierarchical organizations where such conflict is kept private and the public spin purports a unified voice. Examples of tension in the IMC's evolution abound and can be found by browsing the public archives of the organization's mailing lists: lists.indymedia.org, or by using Google to search these archives for specific items.

In the spirit of Indymedia's participatory openness, critics (both observers and IMC participants) are encouraged to get involved and try to lend their energy to solutions. While working on a solution is not a prerequisite for submitting criticism, the atmosphere of Indymedia tends to value constructive action.

Role among International Media Networks

Indymedia is sometimes considered by its supporters to be a competitor to the large international media networks, such as CNN, News Corporation, ABC-USA or the BBC. However, it would be more accurate to say that Indymedia is an example of an open publishing news network/community. Because of its open organizing structure and its internal rules (e.g., copyleft) that no Indymedia center can become a commercial or for-profit organization, it would be impossible for an entity to buy it in a take-over bid.

Independence from Governments/Corporations

Indymedia was founded in opposition to government and corporate-sponsored media, and seeks to facilitate people being able to publish their media as directly as possible. Resistance to the usual media filters appears to have been both exciting and difficult.

For example, in September 2002, the Ford Foundation, proposed funding for an Indymedia regional meeting. This was ultimately refused because many volunteers, especially some from IMC Argentina, were uncomfortable with accepting money from the Foundation, which some believe to be linked to the CIA.

In another example, some IMCs in Europe have faced legal action or threats of legal action related to questions of libel or hate speech. They took local, autonomous decisions to temporarily suspend the site while the different activist groups reorganized to find a consensual, constructive method of dealing with these problems and to increase openness and non-authoritarian organizing methods.

These are just two incidents among many that further exemplified Indymedia's fundamental opposition to government and corporate-linked funding. There have been many tensions within local IMC's and within the broader Indymedia network. These are indicative of the growing pains that any large, rapidly expanding organization faces, and in particular of the anarchistic style of cooperation without restraint this is embodied in the Indymedia model.

Most substantive decisions in Indymedia are made at the community level, however constant collaboration and mutual aid is required at the network, or "global" level -- especially in the maintenance of the technical resources (e.g., servers, software, technical knowledge, etc.). Matters of finance, legal and other issues are also processed at the network level, to the extent that they affect the network.

In addition to email and mailing lists, meetings and real-time communication are done via the Indymedia IRC network: irc.indymedia.org. Various technical and other organizing documentation is available at the Indymedia documentation wiki: docs.indymedia.org.

Reputation

While Indymedia has a good reputation amongst its target audience, this reputation is not universal. Its critics often claim that since anyone can publish with little to no editorial process, opinions and conspiracy theories often are published as purported fact, along with inaccurate (sometimes wildly so) articles and offending, degrading content (e.g., anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist, etc.). A response to these critics is that Indymedia is similar to other open projects like Wikipedia, and shares both their vulnerability to vandalism/sabotage and many of their methods of responding, with the additional element of being strongly rooted in diverse local groups who can take autonomous, transparent action against what they see as sabotage. One difference between Indymedia and Wikipedia is that due to its nature, Indymedia has no prohibition against POV postings and in general, criticism toward Indymedia tends to pertain to point of view issues.

Indymedia lacks representation from any currently Communist nation, or from most Muslim countries.