Media Reclamation Project

In this email:
1) Next meeting Thurs Feb 28 @ 6:30pm
2) Dominion Paper tour event, Thurs Mar 6 @ 7pm
3) Media resources available at OPIRG-Ottawa
4) Web links on community media, alternative publishing

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1) Next Media Matters meeting is Thursday, Feb. 28 @ 6:30pm …

… being held as usual at the OPIRG-Ottawa office, 631 King Edward, 3rd floor. We are looking at starting to hold meetings regularly every second Thursday evening at this time and location, so if it doesn’t work for you and you’d like to come, please let us know – mediamatters@canada.com

Items on the agenda:
- strategic and long-term planning process (involving local communities as well as other media groups)
- creating a (local) media directory
- critical thinking and media literacy: speakers? a course? resources?
- social theatre possibilities
- a speaker event on “Getting Media Coverage for your Cause”
- and any other ideas people bring or send in

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2) Own Your Media tour stop in Ottawa – Thursday March 6 @ 7pm

Own Your Media! Building a Grassroots News Cooperative
Thursday, March 6, at 7pm
Jack Purcell Community Centre, Room 201
320 Jack Purcell Lane, Ottawa
Refreshments provided.

The Dominion (http://dominonpaper.ca) provides accurate, critical news coverage on events, policies and movements in Canada. It is also a multi-stakeholder coop, owned and operated by its readers and journalists.

The Dominion is now taking Canadian media to the next level. With a comprehensive five-year plan, The Dominion aims to build an independent news cooperative that will challenge the corporate press in Canada – and publish the stories you need to know about. You are invited to attend a presentation, where you will be given the opportunity to Own Your Media!

This event is part of a March national tour on the part of the Dominion’s editors.

Print out the poster from http://www.fairtrademedia.com/temp/dom/tourposter.pdf and then write in the Ottawa details, and post it at your workplace or in your community.

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3) Media resources available at OPIRG-Ottawa resource centre

We’d like to take note of some of the resources available at OPIRG-Ottawa, including two magazines that have issues dedicated to the topic of communication media. The resource centre carries books, DVDs and VHS that can be loaned out, while its collection of magazines must be read on-site. Hours are Mon-Fri 10am-5pm but the office is occasionally open earlier or later; phone 613 230-3076 to confirm.

The two magazines are:
Canadian Dimension, Jan-Feb 08 edition, with articles on ‘Why Media Refom Should be a Democratic Priority’, ‘Media Merger Mania’, ‘An Inside Look at the Irvings’, ‘Journalists Changing the World’, ‘The Fight for the Open Internet’, and ‘The Struggle for the Soul of Canadian Media’. Some of these articles are also available online at http://www.canadiandimension.com/
…and…
BriarPatch, June/July 07 edition, with articles on ‘Community Radio & the Frequency of Struggle’, ‘PropAfghanda’, ‘The Power of Imaginative Media’, ‘Covering Fallujah’, ‘Better Zine than Herd’, ‘Love’s Labour Lost’, and ‘Deep Integration Buried Deep in the Back Pages’. Again, some of these articles are available online at http://briarpatchmagazine.com/

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4) Web links

Community Media in Venezuela: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3158

Alternative Publishing and Z-Net: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16562
Here is an excerpt from this, of a questioner and Micheal Albert:
BGST PH: What principles do you think a dissident web site who wants to share a rich content must have in order to be effective and widely known?
MA: The first thing about the question is “what does the word effective mean?” for a website, or for a publisher or for any of those things. For most people, effective means reaching a reasonable size of audience with good material. That’s not what I would mean if I use the word effective. What I would mean would be being part of a process that’s going to win a new society, and that’s very different if you think about it. So, for instance you can imagine a bunch of progressive websites who are functioning quite well, who are putting out a mass of useful information, and you can imagine that going on for a long time, but the whole society doesn’t change. To me, that’s not effective. To me, that’s running a successful business, but it isn’t being a successful movement operation. What’s effective as a movement operation is that the society is changing and even changing dramatically in new directions. So if I ask myself what is needed from a publisher or website or a political organization, the answer is more and more people consciously and militantly desiring a new society and working to win it. So that means that it isn’t sufficient to just put out of information, what is needed is to inspire and help people make good use of it.
BGST PH: Yes, sure.
MA: I think you have to build a community of people who by virtue of the information they are receiving and also their connections to each other become a movement, and even a more and more effective movement. So to me, the answer to your question about a website would be, well, of course, one thing is that it must deliver good content, good information which contributes to people becoming more and more radical. And if you ask me, what kind of information would do that? My answer is it’s partly what everybody does; partly it’s analysis of what’s wrong, analysis of foreign policy, analysis of poverty, analysis of racism, and so on and so forth. But to me that’s not enough because the real obstacle I think to people becoming active, to people becoming really involved, to people devoting themselves, committing themselves to winning something new, is gaining some clarity and confidence about what that new thing is. Clarity about vision. So my first answer to your question is that the first thing a publishing house would need to do is not just provide analysis but also vision, and not even just vision but also strategy. So the content which is being delivered, the information which is being delivered has to be about what’s wrong but also about what we want, what’s desirable, what we’re seeking and desire to win, and how we can go about doing so. So that’s the first part of the problem. The second part of the problem is that the website or the publishing operations should not just deliver content to an audience but should galvanize the audience into working together. It should somehow create out of its audience a community of active people