San Francisco Indymedia Beta Site Launch

August 29, 2004
As this is being written, thousands of people are pouring into New York City to demonstrate at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Four years ago, encouraged by WTO/Seattle demonstrations, organizers mobilized impressive protests at the previous national party conventions, and the Independent Media Network was just getting started. On the west coast, people determined to have a San Francisco Indymedia raced back from the Democratic Convention protest in Los Angeles for a whirlwind month of IMC-building. In the four years since, San Francisco Indymedia has grown as a hub of independent media and information/technology dissemination during tumultuous, historic times in our own city and around the world.

This year, San Francisco IMC has had a unique opportunity to reflect on successes and mistakes of our local Indymedia organizing. Examining our own work experiences with Indymedia, we've attempted to understand how we think about Indymedia and where we think it could go. Finally, we've emerged with a solid vision about our IMC's future (and we hope to expand these discussions on a network-wide level).

So, on the eve of the Republican National Protests, we've launched our new "beta" website, which begins a month of intensive testing and changes for us (we decided to keep with IMC tradition by rolling out new website code at the worst possible time). While these changes will become more evident as our beta test month goes on, the new website is only a part of fundamental changes at SF-IMC which have been developing for a while now.

While we want to enter into larger discussions with all of the IMC network, we are starting here by briefly explaining some of our changes locally. First, we believe that Indymedia needs to mature beyond the weblog. A weblog (or blog) is a website run by one or more people which provides personal "news," commentary and links, updated frequently, usually displayed as one paragraph after another in chronological order. Many Indymedia's are best described as collaborative "blogs" produced by IMC editorial groups with an additional anonymous, moderated bulletin board system (BBS) called newswires.

This reality conflicts with Indymedia's broader potential — an international networked wire service of amateur, professional, and independent journalists and media producers dedicated to in-depth, on-the-ground coverage of deeply significant news and events. We believe SF-IMC and the network-at-large needs to be less about small clubs of friends running a weblog and tackle the challenges of being a global, non-commercial media network. We want to kickstart a shift towards maturing into a real media network that can compete with any of the best wire services in the world.

At SF Indymedia, we are beginning with our website's front page: we are moving away from a front page heavy with weblog-style content to an online newspaper format, updated daily, with quick links that take you to more substantial information and articles. We are also moving away from theme-based categorization and moving towards newswires based on location and type of information (local, national, international, opinion, press releases) which is already standard in the news syndication world. We are also deploying a new back-end admin interface for sf-active and other Indymedia software which makes this transition easier.

How we work together in San Francisco is also changing. One aspect of this is that we have decided to dissolve media-based working groups. In the past, we organized into Video Group, Audio Group, Photo Group and we realized that these isolated worlds became mini-fiefdom's unto themselves, providing more fertile ground for turf struggles than working, collaborative media projects. We have been experimenting with organizing ourselves into fluid news crews with a mix of writers, photographers, researchers, etc who come together to work on a particular story or just covering a local beat. This model has already proved to be noticeably more healthy for the organization and we plan on expanding it rapidly in the next month.

And finally, we have admitted some humility and decided we should learn some lessons from the corporate media. We believe there should be some culture of accountability within Indymedia and we are embarrassed that many corporate media organizations probably have better-defined codes of ethics than most IMCs.

For instance, while major newspapers make guarantees of confidentiality to sources (backed by long histories of fighting for this right in courtrooms), our local IMC in the past has not even been able to guarantee basic security culture to activists we've worked with. And accountability around accuracy in reporting is also a focus. A recent example: a police deparatment publicly released guidelines for a summit protest which said "officers are not permitted to use their firearms unless in direct, personal danger" — somehow this ended up on the homepage of an IMC as "police give 'shoot to kill' order for summit protest." This level of carelessness and direct inaccuracy of facts wouldn't fly long in the corporate media world. Indymedia's critique of corporate media is still relevant, strong as ever and provides us all with inspiration to build an alternative. But we must have the honesty to admit where they do a better job than us (and consequently get levels of respect and attention which we do not).

Developing better content and building peer relationships which improve all of our skills is critical. We believe that less focus on dense front pages and feature pages which are mostly filler sentences so we can link to something means more focus on quality, competitive information which is more desperately needed.

The ideas and changes presented here only scratch the surface of where we see SF Indymedia going in the next year. Many more changes will be immediately deployed in the next month, so please bear with our beta, testing site. More importantly, we are more interested than ever with inter-IMC networking with anyone who is intrigued by the goals we've set out here for ourselves. Please get in touch -- either email us at  sf@indymedia.org or call us at (415) 308-7337.

Now, out to the streets to meet George Bush and company!