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Grassroots Alternative Media Meet Academe

(September 19, 2007) - Academic conferences are ordinarily scholarly affairs. Professors and graduate students deliver their latest research and propound new theories to each other. It was something of a novelty, then, when three panels at last May's International Communications Association conference in San Francisco featured grassroots activists and producers of alternative nonprofit media.

The scholars who organized the three panels explained: "While alternative content producers and media policy advocates are the frequent objects of study by communication scholars, the practitioners committed to grassroots and participatory processes and the academics who so eagerly analyze them seldom interact directly." The panels were an attempt to bridge the gap. The speakers recounted their experiences in the world of webzines, videoblogging, alternative journalism, and grassroots organizing for media democracy.

The first panel, "Participatory Models and Alternative Content Production," featured Ryan Junell of Webzine, Jay Dedman of Ourmedia, Ronda Hauben of OhmyNews International, David Sasaki of Global Voices, and Ilyse Hogue of MoveOn. The second, "Alternative Journalisms," included Shinjoung Yeo of Radical Reference, Josh Wolf of the Free the Media Coalition and RiseUp Networks, Don Hazen of Alternet, and Bob Ostertag, author of People's Movements. "Civil Society and Regulation" was the subject of the third session, and featured Pete Tridish of the Prometheus Radio Project, Malkia Cyril of the Youth Media Council, Todd Davies of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Josh Wolf, who was jailed in 2005 for refusing to give government investigators his video footage of an anti-G8 protest, summed up the importance of alternative media. "One of the ironic strengths of independent media is that they rarely can sustain their creators' economic needs," he said.

While this means that independent journalists have far less time to dedicate to journalistic pursuits as a sole means of employment, it also means that they have more liberty and freedom to explore with far less financial risk than those working within the corporate structure.

Yet, he added, a healthy media system needs both:

Without well-funded mainstream media there are many important stories that would never get the attention they deserve (just as there are many stories that are given the attention they do not deserve), and without independent media and alternative sources for information, a whole realm of vital situations would get no coverage at all. And though many in independent media would disagree with me, I feel that both the commercial and independent media play an important role in our society.

The core problem, Wolf concluded, "is the lack of media literacy in the United States. The problem is that there are actually people who think that because Bill O'Reilly says his show is the No Spin Zone that his program is actually free from bias." (See FEPP's report, Media Literacy, an Alternative to Censorship, for more on media literacy education.)

The text of the panels is now available in a book titled Alternatives on Media Content, Journalism, and Regulation, http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/reco_book2.pdf. Its editors - who were also the organizers of the panels - are Seeta Peņa Gangadharan, Benjamin De Cleen and Nico Carpentier. They have also created a website on grassroots alternative media at http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/grass/grassindex.html