Number Crunching Indymedia
pocket calculator | 04.03.2015 18:45 | Indymedia
With the announcement of #RealMedia, intended to provide a hub of activist journalism like Indymedia was in its earlier years, it's a good time to check in on the status of Indymedia UK. It's now been in the hands of the May Day clique for almost four years. How has it fared? Let's look at numbers provided by the site.
With the announcement of #RealMedia, it's a good time to check in on the status of Indymedia UK. It's now been in the hands of the May Day clique for almost four years. How has it fared?
Indymedia UK editors won't (can't, actually) admit the site has foundered badly under May Day, and will insist - with characteristic charm - that no one can prove otherwise without direct access to the server logs, which you won't get, so go fuck yourself. But it turns out that they do provide, despite themselves, the information you need to see just how the site participation has sunk.
How about the open newswire, the heart and soul of the Indymedia movement? Here we can do an apples-to-apples comparison with February 2011, the last pre-coup February. A glance at Indymedia's own archives - publicly available information - shows that in February 2011, slightly over a thousand stories were posted to the newswire. In February 2015, there were only eighty. That is, as compared to the pre-MayDay days, only four short years ago, Indymedia UK is ninety-two percent dead. May Day have cleverly 92% killed it.
Here's a bar chart. Suppose this many articles were posted to the newswire in February 2011:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
This many were published in February 2015:
XXXX
The difference of the two is the many who fled Indymedia after the coup:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The "promoted newswire" - announced last year to be the centerpiece, the main value of the post-coup site, free of the postings of the hoi polloi, each story individually blessed by an Indy mod - how did that work out? Abysmally. It's effectively empty; stories aren't promoted there in anything like a timely manner. Only exactly three stories in the entire month of February 2015, one of them (coincidence surely!) quoting at length one Tom Anderson ... who is an Indymedia UK editor. So it's not really a "promoted newswire" so much as a rarely updated bulletin board dedicated in significant proportion to the editors' selfies. (But wait! A fourth was furtively promoted on the last day of February, more than a week after it was first posted on the open wire. Indymedia UK has, with its "promoted newswire" that promotes almost nothing, simply removed itself from the "timely news" category.)
On the center column for February 2015, let's look at ... well, no, nothing at all to look at there, no new stories were posted there in February. In fact, none in half a year; almost a year, if you don't count two about Indymedia itself.
Most activists knew in 2011 that Indymedia UK under May Day was going to fade into irrelevance. In four years, it is 92% of the way there.
Indymedia UK editors won't (can't, actually) admit the site has foundered badly under May Day, and will insist - with characteristic charm - that no one can prove otherwise without direct access to the server logs, which you won't get, so go fuck yourself. But it turns out that they do provide, despite themselves, the information you need to see just how the site participation has sunk.
How about the open newswire, the heart and soul of the Indymedia movement? Here we can do an apples-to-apples comparison with February 2011, the last pre-coup February. A glance at Indymedia's own archives - publicly available information - shows that in February 2011, slightly over a thousand stories were posted to the newswire. In February 2015, there were only eighty. That is, as compared to the pre-MayDay days, only four short years ago, Indymedia UK is ninety-two percent dead. May Day have cleverly 92% killed it.
Here's a bar chart. Suppose this many articles were posted to the newswire in February 2011:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
This many were published in February 2015:
XXXX
The difference of the two is the many who fled Indymedia after the coup:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The "promoted newswire" - announced last year to be the centerpiece, the main value of the post-coup site, free of the postings of the hoi polloi, each story individually blessed by an Indy mod - how did that work out? Abysmally. It's effectively empty; stories aren't promoted there in anything like a timely manner. Only exactly three stories in the entire month of February 2015, one of them (coincidence surely!) quoting at length one Tom Anderson ... who is an Indymedia UK editor. So it's not really a "promoted newswire" so much as a rarely updated bulletin board dedicated in significant proportion to the editors' selfies. (But wait! A fourth was furtively promoted on the last day of February, more than a week after it was first posted on the open wire. Indymedia UK has, with its "promoted newswire" that promotes almost nothing, simply removed itself from the "timely news" category.)
On the center column for February 2015, let's look at ... well, no, nothing at all to look at there, no new stories were posted there in February. In fact, none in half a year; almost a year, if you don't count two about Indymedia itself.
Most activists knew in 2011 that Indymedia UK under May Day was going to fade into irrelevance. In four years, it is 92% of the way there.
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