Independent media website online for Gainesville

Independent media website online for Gainesville
Ryan Brouillard
February 2001

Created due to popular demand, the new Gainesville Independent Media Center web site officially opened in December, 2000 to give local activists and seekers of non corporate, progressive news, a forum to educate the community and to encourage the exchanging of socially conscious ideas.

After its first month in existence, the GIMC already has received a steady flow of traffic, with new articles being posted almost daily. As more people use this site to post information on the news wire, the more the page will be updated with fresh stories and announcements. So far there have been many articles posted in the areas of ecology, activism, women's issues, anarchism, protest, freedom of speech, indigenous rights, the prison industrial complex, etc.

This page allows the user to log in a password to access all of the stories that they have published and read messages they have received from others. There are also links to the other IMC web sites, as well as a topic by topic list of links to other progressive and radical Internet pages, created by those who use the GIMC.

GIMC may also be a great tool for the Gainesville community to post announcements and related stories to a large local audience, and could possibly serve to cut down the bombardment of daily email that many activists and organizers receive from group list serves.

The original Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), was established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the now famous World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in November 1999. The center was created to allow journalists to publish up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio and video footage through its Internet site.

As the original Independent Media Center site states, "it is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non corporate coverage. It is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity."

Since Seattle, more than 45 IMC's have sprung up in Europe, Australia, Canada, Congo, Mexico, Columbia, Israel, Brazil and the U.S., and have covered the direct action protests against capitalism and imperialism at the WTO meetings in Prague, the World Economic Forum protests in Melbourne, the International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings in D.C., the School of the America's march at Ft. Benning, and will cover the upcoming Free Trade of the America's Act meetings in Quebec. IMC's also serve the public with information about any acts that impede on human rights and ecology.

"The IMC is doing more than breaking the corporate monopoly on story telling, it is inventing new media models that are uniquely equipped to mirror the international and diverse nature of this protest movement. This is media that crosses borders and issues like no communication network we have ever seen before," said Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo," her new book which focuses on corporate dominance through advertising campaigns.

Many thanks go out to the designer of the GIMC and those who have been contributing to its upkeep.