Asheville Indymedia: Democratic Grassroots Media is Coming to Town!

asheville | media | feature Friday February 16, 2007 09:39 by Asheville Indymedia Collective ashevilleimc at mountainrebel dot net

In this hotbed of progressive activity in the mountains of Western North Carolina, a new media collective has been formed. The Asheville Independent Media Center (AIMC) is a not-for-profit open-publishing news website that hopes to support and foster grassroots social and environmental activism. By providing the digital infrastructure for ordinary people to publish articles, ideas, announcements and events, the AIMC collective hopes to empower and support local communities and campaigns that are otherwise not represented in mainstream media.

The idea behind open publishing is simple: Anyone can post news to the AIMC website, including text, photos, audio, and video. News appears on the open publishing newswire on the right side of the website. The AIMC editorial working group decides what news is important and pressing enough to deserve to be featured in the center-column and what news needs to be hidden or deleted, all the while keeping the Editorial Guidelines in mind, which are posted on the website and decided on democratically by the AIMC collective. The collective is open for anyone to join, and all decisions are made transparently through a process of consensus. The AIMC outreach working group actively works to grow the collective (both in membership and in diversity) and to provide a diverse array of local grassroots organizations the knowledge and skills they need to publish to the website.

Asheville Indymedia is truly independent. No corporation owns AIMC, no government manages the organization, no single donor finances the project. AIMC is not the mouthpiece of any political party or organization. People involved with Indymedia have a wide variety of political and personal viewpoints. Anyone may participate in Indymedia organizing and anyone may post to the Indymedia newswires. Political parties or organizations may choose to publish articles on the Indymedia newswires, but in doing so they invite public debate about their positions from any reader of the site; any reader may respond by publishing his/her comments alongside the post in question.

Asheville Indymedia is in the process of formally joining the global Independent Media Center Network (IMCN), of which there are over 170 autonomous local collectives all around the world.

The first IMC started when several hundred media activists came together late November of 1999 in Seattle to cover protests against the World Trade Organization. The Seattle IMC website received almost 1.5 million hits during the WTO protests. In February of 2000 a small IMC formed in Boston to cover the Biodevastation Convergence, and a larger one came together in Washington D.C. to cover the A16 protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. After that, requests from local groups interested in forming their own IMCs started to pour in. For more information about the IMCN, see www.indymedia.org.

Asheville IMC meets the first Thursday of each month at 5:30pm at The Dripolator Coffeehouse in downtown Asheville. Everyone is welcome to attend.