I arrived in Denver early this a.m. in preparation for The Media Consortium’s third (!) production of Live From Main Street tomorrow. (If you’re not in Denver you can catch it livestreaming at 3 p.m. PST/4 p.m. MST/5 p.m. CST/6 p.m. EST at FireDogLake, Link TV, The Uptake and many more.)

While LFMS is my main reason for being at the DNC, I’m going to spend most of the week documenting the activities of the progressive media, mainstream media, panels, events, parties, interesting people and any other fun thing I can find or attend. And from the moment I stepped off the plane–I knew I was in for something good. Practically the first thing I saw was this billboard:

Billboard from Denver Airport: from Gov. Ritter on global warming and green jobs

Why did this billboard catch my eye? Because it dovetailed EXACTLY with the lede from Adele Stan’s article “What Will the Green Economy Look Like?”, an article written in advance of LFMS.

And it didn’t end there.

When I jumped in a cab, my driver Mike started telling me about how he volunteers twice a month at the local independent radio station KGNU where he plays the music he likes and rails against Bill O’Reilly. And until two days ago, his cab had a big sign on top of it promoting “Democracy Now.” (His idea btw–not paid for by DN.) Unfortunately, his cab broke down and he’s borrowing another for the week! When he’s not driving, Mike’s is shooting a documentary about the struggles and organizing efforts of the local taxi drivers. Imagine–a hot bed of independent media right in my own taxi cab!

After arriving at the extremely cute house we rented for the week, the LFMS crew headed straight to The Big Tent, the top hub for activists and media throughout the Democratic National Convention. (LFMS is kicking off the The Big Tent tomorrow!) The Big Tent, a temporary two-story structure, has been literally built over the last few weeks and is in its final stages of construction. Check it out:

The last stages of The Big Tent's construction

As we walked from The Big Tent to a local pub for lunch, delegates and convention volunteers were already starting to swarm the streets. (We also saw a lot cops out in full gear.) And then we saw this:

The Donkey on a segway

The Elephant on a segway

Want to take a guess what these two were promoting? MSNBC Political News!

Perfect beginning to what should be an exciting, exhausting, confounding week. Stay tuned for more!

To build on Tracy’s concerns in her last post: I recently took a look at Salon’s new user-generated content experiment, Open Salon.

I’m a real Salon fan–it’s the only site I pay for premium access. That’s why I received an invitation email to the new site, in which Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh explains:

Now that it’s public, Open Salon speaks for itself. Here’s the quick view: It’s part blogging platform, part social network. You don’t need an invitation: Just sign up, and you can start your own blog, maintain a profile page and connect with friends and writers you admire. Thanks to a partnership with Revolution MoneyExchange, members can directly pay writers whose work they admire, with no service fees. Open Salon editors curate a cover, but readers have power there, too - the cover features lists of the top read and highest rated stories alongside our editors’ picks. We’ll frequently choose the best posts to feature on Salon.

In short, you can use our audience to build your own audience. And if you’re too busy to keep up your own blog, you can also find a whole new world of great writing–and people who want to talk about it.

Use their audience to start your audience—smart, right? I even considered it myself for a moment, and then remembered that I have book chapters to write, myriad tasks for my job at the Center for Social Media, and this odd urge to actually have a life outside of one screen or another.

Fire it up this morning, and who do I find on the front page? Jay Rosen. Rosen has become a leading proponent of the idea that professional journalists aren’t the only ones who can dig up the news we need to run our country and keep the powerful in check. He’s pioneered fascinating experiments examining the limits of this concept, like the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus.Net.

He’s also got a day job, which subsidizes his work and provides him with a safety net. As he told a gathering of online media makers last spring, “I am a tenured professor of journalism, I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

Good for him; there are lots of tenured professors who are doing, well, fuck-all with their privileged status. But his situation points out the problem: without a subsidy or a salary, who can afford to endlessly contribute to the online forums and social media tools springing up on a near-daily basis?

This is what I was afraid of and noted in my previous post (second link). I have a feeling this “business” model is going to make a lot of people unhappy, and in the long run, is doomed.
Anyone see other reactions to HuffPo’s Chicago move?

So I’ve been a little slow on the blogging the last week and a half and that’s for a couple reasons.
1) I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis in my left wrist. Very painful and hard to type.
2) Jess and I were prepping for a presentation at the academic National Conference for Media Reform pre-conference where we presented our theories and latest examples from our book. (Happy to share if you want. We’re also figuring out how to get it on slide share.)
3) I was also prepping for my moderation of the NCMR panel, “How the Independent Media Makes Change.” In short, the panel rocked. (And I don’t usually say that about panels.) Panelists included Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, Jeff Morely of the Center for Independent Media and Daisy Hernandez of ColorLines. I’m going to be posting video and commentary on that asap. (I’m struggling through learning the new Imovie8 and having problems importing. Ah, technology.)

But most of all, I and the rest of The Media Consortium team were consumed by preparations for the launch of Live From Main Street. I could tell you all about it, but let me just repeat snippets of what LFMS host Laura Flanders wrote at the Huffington Post.

A year ago, a group of independent media professionals looked ahead to the 2008 election season. Anticipating the same stump speech in 50 states and the same old reporting to go along with it, they wondered, ‘what if, instead of the candidates’ horse-race, we covered goings-on around the track?’ The project we came up with together is Live from Main Street: a series of live events, in five states in five months, bringing audiences the local perspective on critical national issues.

On June 8, in Minneapolis, Live From Main Street kicked off in the Twin Cities. Locals weren’t just backdrop for a report a national story: they were the main event. On stage — discussing the election, organizing, media and more, were organizers, journalists, artists — sharing their accounts of the free speech challenges their community’s facing in the run-up to the Republican National Convention. And it wasn’t all bad news. Alongside the grim reports of permits denied and protests squashed, we heard the latest word on “unconventional” convention plans — “our roving reporters will be mounted on bicycles connected by GPS” Marlina Gonzales of the UnConvention told Live From Main Street. “Today’s Main Street is a new Main Street” said Malkia Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice. Politicians make old assumptions at their peril, she added. It’s not just about bias, it’s about getting the story wrong.

Over the next five months, Live From Main Street will be hosting town-hall type discussions about critical issues in Miami, Denver, Columbus and Seattle. We want to take the agenda-setting out of the hands candidates’ consultants — and put an ear to the voters themselves. In Minneapolis, the focus was on civil liberties and the need for media diversity. In Miami in July, the attention will shift to cities and sustainable development. In Columbus, the topic’s voting; in Seattle, national security from a female point of view. We’ve heard from the politiicans. At the end of the election season, Live From Main Street hopes to have heard– and amplified what voters mean by that catchword “change.”

The first LFMS was an amazing success–with a raucous crowd of 450 people. But instead of me telling you about it: let’s just watch, shall we?

Welcome to Live From Main Street

Amy Goodman on Independent Media

Civil Liberties in the Twin Cities Pre-RNC

Live From Main Street: What the nation can learn from Minnesota

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Sam Husseni, media director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (formerly of the Institute for Public Accuracy) challenges Jeff Cohen’s article that coverage of the Winter Soldier hearings was a “victory for independent media.” The hearings were organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War and showcased some powerful testimony from American veterans on the breakdown of the military, corporate takeover of the military, veteran healthcare and more. It was amazing and heartbreaking stuff.

I’m going with Sam on this one. Jeff cites three media outlets (three!) that covered the hearings live. Free Speech TV, Pacifica and Real News. I heard that the BBC was there as well. (And In These Times and AlterNet wrote articles later.) Brava to all of them. They put some resources into what could have been an incredibly important media moment that had real political impact. For all our talk and outrage of how the Bush administration is running (or not running as the case may be) this war and treating our veterans like crap, we don’t take the time to hear from and cover the very individuals who have personal insight into the terrifying events overseas and the aftermath of when they come home?

I can almost understand why the corporate media didn’t cover the events. It’s not about the election? This is a messy story? It exposes the America’s regular and ongoing military atrocities? No, no, not so comfortable with that. But the independent, progressive media? Maybe much of the independent media could argue that they didn’t have people in DC to cover the events. But funny enough, I saw many of them at the annual Beltway progressive conference, Take Back America just a day later.

We’re all figuring out how to prioritize our resources and capital. I just wish that sometimes we think outside the box and not follow in the mainstream media’s footsteps in terms of what we deem priority coverage.

Ok–done with rant now.

The 2007 winners of the George Polk awards were announced yesterday, and we were excited to see some of our own. This year, the Polk awards recognized, “journalists in 14 categories for media coverage that exposed corporate and government misfeasance, revealed the industrial roots of environmental catastrophe and uncovered the abuse of vulnerable populations including children, the elderly and veterans.”

The ones that popped out for us:

The Polk Award for Legal Reporting will go to Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of the widely read political blog, Talking Points Memo. His sites, www.talkingpointsmemo.com and www.tpmMuckraker.com, led the news media in coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall and his staff (with his staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration’s bidding. Marshall’s tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/us-attorneys/2007/03/

The George Polk Book Award will be presented to Jeremy Scahill, whose explosive bestseller, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” (published by Nation Books, a co-publishing venture between The Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group), chronicled the ascent of Blackwater USA, a North Carolina-based company that has become one of the world’s premiere providers of private military services. Scahill’s work exposed killings, human rights violations and misconduct allegedly by the firm’s personnel and revealed the U.S. government’s growing reliance on this “shadow army.” His reporting and Congressional testimony helped propel legislation that would ban U.S. government security contracts with Blackwater and other private military companies.
http://www.nationbooks.org/book/5/Blackwater

Freelance writer Joshua A. Kors will receive the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. His two-part series “Thanks For Nothing,” investigated the story of Jon Town, a former U.S. Army specialist who suffered severe hearing loss, memory problems and depression from exposure to a 107-millimeter rocket explosion in Iraq. Town received a purple heart but later was refused disability or medical benefits based on the Army’s claim that he had a pre-existing personality disorder. Building upon this case, Kors uncovered how military doctors were misdiagnosing thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq as being mentally ill, thereby cheating them out of medical care and disability pay and saving the military billions of dollars. His two articles, which were published in The Nation, fueled a national uproar and congressional action; in January, President Bush signed a law requiring the secretary of defense to investigate all personality-disorder discharges and report them to Congress. Town is now receiving his medical and disability benefits.
http://www.joshuakors.com/military

The awards are also posthumously acknowledging Chauncey W. Bailey Jr., the slain editor of The Oakland Post, a weekly paper for black readers.

Via The NY Times, “[Bailey] was gunned down on August 2. during his investigation of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a business the police called a front for a criminal organization, which has been linked to kidnappings, rapes and killings, including Mr. Bailey’s.The police said seven men were arrested, a bakery worker confessed to the murder and the organization went out of business. The Committee to Protect Journalists said Mr. Bailey was the first journalist apparently picked as a target for killing in this country since 1993, though others have died in the line of duty.”

My In These Times cover story, “iPower to the People: The perils and promise of point-and-click politics” went online this week, just in time for tonight’s no-doubt painful Republican YouTube/CNN debate.

Writing it was an exercise in the increasing difficulty of crafting long-form pieces in an era of blogs and minute-by-minute updates. But hopefully I captured some larger trends, and tried to give time to both those who have high hopes for participatory online political engagement, and those who find it to be just another form of marketing.

For an impassioned and more cynical view of the whole concept, check out Marty Kaplan’s take on tonight’s spectacle at the Huffington Post. “The faux populism of the YouTube format is an Orwellian leap even for CNN,” he writes, “where anchors are already required to i.d. correspondents as ‘part of the best political team on television.’(Every time Wolf says that, an angel is lethally injected.)”

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

Media Pundit or Media Critic?

In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, Jeff Cohen, founder of the preeminent media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), offers readers an insider’s look at the soulless world of corporate media.

Cohen’s book, a fun read, bucks the dryness of most media criticism. It’s chock full of stories about his interactions with TV pundits (you’ll find yourself cheering at some of the transcripts), examinations of the corporate media’s self-interest, and his own struggles to work in and outside the system at the same time.

Starting in the ’80s, Cohen and FAIR fought tirelessly to fact-check the corporate and right-wing media. After initially reluctant guest appearances on CNN’s “Crossfire,” he eventually embraced his role as an on-air personality. His mission: balancing out the din of the right-wing and centrist pundits on cable news with strong and true progressive voices.

“For two decades, I’ve been preoccupied with one issue above all others: that both ends of the political spectrum get their say in the media,” Cohen writes. “The issue haunted me at FAIR. It haunted my TV career. It haunts my dreams. One reason (among many) that I worked so hard to retire George W. Bush in 2004 was my nightmare that a defeated John Kerry would be hired by cable news to represent ‘the left’ day after day on a TV debate show.”

In 1995, after being considered for one of Crossfire’s new co-hosts and then shunted aside for a less progressive voice, Cohen joined Fox News’ “News Watch” as a regular guest. He then embarked to MSNBC, where his work for Phil Donahue was spiked over post-9/11 fears that the show was too liberal and antiwar.

While the influence of the Internet is steadily growing, cable news and their offspring (CNBC and CNN Headline News) continue to be the places where political messaging is shaped. Cohen’s book reminds us that a battle still needs to be fought on the television airwaves and, through his victories and mistakes, he shows how to confront the challenges we face.