The Promise of IndyMedia

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At the end of November in 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 co-ops 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.) All save one 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.

From the start, IndyMedia was a collaborative endeavor. “Don’t hate the media, be the media,” its slogan went. “There were people teaching folks how to code, doing audio interviews, uploading their videos to this newswire—that was revolutionary,” Ana Nogueira, who founded New York’s IndyMedia center in 2000, recalled. “At the time, the idea was just that the spaces would be temporary, to cover movement protests, specifically global justice movement moments. But it was quickly realized that this needs to be a permanent thing.” Each local center was scrappy and self-run, which applied to all manner of editorial, staffing, and funding decisions. Early on, the work was done entirely on a volunteer basis; later, through donations and ad sales, some centers found the means to pay contributors.

Editorial committee members, representing centers from across the IndyMedia network, conferred over email about what to feature on the national and international sites; their deliberations were translated across languages. The approach “connected towns and cities together around a common cause,” Nogueira said. She remembers a story about farmers fighting for better conditions in Bolivia, and another, similar piece set in India; each of those countries’ centers wound up joining forces to organize. There was coverage of workers in Argentina reclaiming failed businesses in the wake of national economic collapse. “I remember seeing on the newswire comments from workers from other places, asking more questions about the worker takeovers, and the organizers responding,” Nogueira recalled. That IndyMedia functioned not merely as a disparate network, but as a publisher, made it particularly effective at uniting people. “IndyMedia scaled across topics, so that you could see, for example, that there were struggles around housing justice in New York City and see how they were connected to similar struggles in Spain, or in parts of Central America,” Wolfson, whose 2014 book, Digital Rebellion, examines early movement media efforts use of the internet, said. “It really bound those things together in a way that we just don’t have at this point.”

In the early aughts, IndyMedia expanded rapidly. But as the organization became larger, so did the weight of its decisions about how best to support that growth. Committee members came to an agreement that acceptance of any major philanthropy had to require total buy-in from all local chapters. At one point, when the Ford Foundation offered funding, IndyMedia Argentina voted against it, and the network had to decline. The rise of Facebook and Twitter, with their own self-publishing platforms, redirected the energy of people suddenly able to post even more independently than before. Local centers shuttered.

During that time, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Pickard, who had followed IndyMedia from the start, happened upon one local center “in the middle of the cornfields,” he recalled, that resisted the downward slide, to marvelous effect: the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center. The UCIMC, as it’s known, was established a year after the inaugural chapter in Seattle, and made a couple of key decisions from its early days that put it in good stead: it registered as a nonprofit organization and claimed a piece of real estate. “We Midwest organizers are a very practical bunch of people,” Danielle Chynoweth, one of the founders of the UCIMC, told me. “We’re in farming communities, we like to get things done, and we don’t spend lots of time arguing with each other over the details. So while the IndyMedia movement was having a lot of arguments of, like, Should we engage in the power structure or not? Should we engage with the state? We’re like, That’s fine, you have your conversation over there, we’ll set up a 501(c)(3) here.”  

The UCIMC produced a news site, the Public I, and used its physical space to house community meetings and events, while fundraising and applying for grants. “We had so many ideas and projects,” Chynoweth said. One was a gathering to construct internet-access devices using mesh technology (a precursor to Wi-Fi), sponsored by the Open Society Foundations; another helped build out the local internet infrastructure in low-income areas. The UCIMC orchestrated a successful campaign to lower the cost of prison phone calls in the state. There were skateboard-making workshops for kids, performances. “We were the happening space in town,” Chynoweth told me.

Eventually, in 2005—Chynoweth noted that it was May 5, Karl Marx’s birthday—the UCIMC bought the city’s historic downtown post office: a sprawling, three-story brick building, fronted by Doric columns. On the roof, they placed a hundred-foot radio tower, for the center’s new station, WRFU Radio Free Urbana. Inside were offices and organizing spaces, which have since been used for community initiatives such as Books to Prisoners and Makerspace, a tech-education lab. Recently, the team has focused on coverage and programs around policing; in response to a three-million-dollar plan to expand the local police department, the UCIMC hosted a series of meetings that drew wide engagement—and, ultimately, helped steer the city council away from its original proposal, in favor of hiring just one police officer and more community engagement and social workers. “I think the work,” Chynoweth said, “is communicating how policies come to be and how do you bring to fruition wide-scale policy change.” When it comes to press coverage, she observed, media outlets tend to have “a very thin understanding of how change happens.” Crucially, the UCIMC acts as a landlord, renting about half of the building’s space to other nonprofits, artists, businesses, and the Postal Service. The rental income generates about 70 percent of the center’s revenue; the rest comes from grants and donations.

For Wolfson and Pickard, that is all—still—proof of concept for a revolutionary system. “When I talk about a public media center, I’m really thinking of the UCIMC,” Pickard told me. In their view, centers such as these can and should exist across the country; Pickard believes that, in the most ambitious, utopian model, they would be federally guaranteed and supported. Through the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, and inspired by the lessons of IndyMedia, Wolfson and Pickard are researching how to develop local infrastructure that can be replicated and used to build connections across communities—a challenge of particular urgency now, in the wake of an election that showed just how fragmented America’s media landscape is. Wolfson is interviewing staff of the UCIMC, as well as others in public media and activists; Pickard is interviewing local journalists elsewhere. What they have found so far is that, to community members, the work of local journalism is intrinsically tied to social organizing. That’s the approach that Chynoweth, from her start at IndyMedia, has always taken. “I think that we are a really good case study in that,” she said.

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Feven Merid is CJR’s staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow.