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ILCA Convention to Help Workers Tell Real Story of New Orleans |
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Steve Stallone, president of the International Labor Communications Association, writes about the group’s plans to use its convention next month to bring labor media and local workers together to tell the story of what is happening in New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina.
These days, we hear a lot about “citizen journalism,” where regular folks contribute to the flow of information through cell phone photos, blogs and YouTube-type video.
Some newspapers are seeking reader input on stories. Attempts to include and engage the knowledge, expertise and experience of previously passive media consumers—now being dubbed “crowdsourcing”—is sort of an interactive journalism, a kind of Web 2.0, Wikipedia model of media.
But even this kind of interactive journalism doesn’t allow people to tell their own stories or explore the subjects and angles they deem important, unfiltered and unmediated by “professionals” and their notions of respectable and responsible journalism. It doesn’t give the consumer access to the tools and technologies of journalism.
The first contemporary attempt by labor communicators to create a truly people-centered journalism was the establishment of the Independent Media Center in Seattle during the week of World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999. There, experienced journalists worked with activist newcomers to produce their own coverage of the events in video, audio, web and print formats. Their work helped push the mainstream media to adopt a more critical edge in its coverage and to even deal with the bigger globalization issues the protesters raised.
For several years, labor journalists have kicked around the idea of creating “labor media centers,” places to teach and empower rank-and-file workers to create their own media. ILCA vice presidents Howard Kling and Fred Glass published articles in the Winter 2003 issue of Labor Studies Journal updating the concept Glass first proposed in articles in the same journal in the 1980s. Both Glass, who is communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, and Kling, director of Labor Education Services at the University of Minnesota, are educators who do this kind of media training as a regular part of their jobs.
At the 2005 ILCA Convention in Chicago, the delegates passed a resolution calling for the organization to support, among other things, labor media centers. ILCA plans to turn this year’s convention into a large labor media center experiment.
We are taking this year’s convention to New Orleans, a city that, in its post-Katrina days, is dealing with all the problems working people throughout the country are facing—racism, exploitive use of immigrant workers, housing, environmental degradation, privatization and deunionization—but in a concentrated form.
We plan to bring labor communicators and rank-and-file workers together to report the ongoing stories of these struggles. We intend to use the media tools and technologies of a labor media center to create articles, blogs, broadcast and video stories that capture the issues behind the tragedy and explain their meaning for all of us. Together, we will demonstrate the power of labor’s voice.
We hope to remind and inform the country of the continuing crises in New Orleans and relate those problems to what workers are facing everywhere, while our members learn by doing and demonstrate the power and empowerment of labor media centers.
This will be a convention unlike any you have attended before, an exciting and educational experience. So mark the dates on your calendar for Oct. 18-20. Click here for more details on registration and the program. But hurry. The deadline for early registration is Sept. 24. After that date, the registration fee of $200 increases to $250.
3 Comments
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Interesting stuff
Thanks for mentioning the Independent Media Center. Many stories about blogs and citizen journalism fail to mention it, perhaps because they aren’t aware of it, or because the layout isn’t “bloggy” so they assume that it’s like a traditional news site.
The real story is day after day people were fed & had water to drink. CNN camera on the third day swung to to left and there was a newslady sitting under an umbrella reading a paper with a drink on the table next to the CNN motor home. No one suffered, except to get to the stadium since there were no drivers(?) for the schoolbuses. CNN slept on clean sheets when they didn’t ask the people to show how they were starving and dying, thousands died!