San Francisco Indymedia, expanding our horizons

August 29, 2004

As this is being written, thousands of people are pouring into New York City to participate in the 2004 Republican National Convention. Four years ago, encouraged by WTO/Seattle organizers mobilized impressive support 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. In the four years since, San Francisco Indymedia has grown as a hub of independent media and information/technology dissemination , as well as a good place to post if you want to look for a date.

This year, San Francisco IMC has had a unique opportunity to reflect on successes and mistakes of our other Indymedia sights organizing. , 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.It is worth looking at the San Francisco Mission Statement to understand where indymedia is coming from. It's also of particular relevance to this discussion that free speech does *not* appear anywhere in the San Francisco or uk mission statements.

So, on the eve of the Republican National convemtion, we've launched our new website, which begins a month of intensive testing and changes for us While these changes will become more evident as our 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. we see most of the smaller IMC's doing a poor job at providing an adiquet standard of service, and we need to change this.Many Indymedia's are best described as collaborative "blogs" produced by IMC editorial groups.

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.

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. but our big change is we will now carry sponsors

Budwiser, Kraft, and Philip Morris just to name a few.

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. we will now provide a full accounting to the Dept.of homeland security And accountability around accuracy in reporting to them is also a focus . 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 have temperence to the companies who now pay us.

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 --



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Now, out to the streets to meet George Bush and get him back into the white house!