ILCA Convention to Help Workers Tell Real Story of New Orleans

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/17/ilca-convention-to-help-workers-tell-real-story-of-new-orleans/

Steve Stallone, president of the International Labor Communications Association, writes about the group’s plans to use its convention next month to bring labor media and local workers together to tell the story of what is happening in New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina.

These days, we hear a lot about “citizen journalism,” where regular folks contribute to the flow of information through cell phone photos, blogs and YouTube-type video.


This poster by Ricardo Levins Morales (www.northlandposter.com) symbolizes ILCA’s commitment to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.


Some newspapers are seeking reader input on stories. Attempts to include and engage the knowledge, expertise and experience of previously passive media consumers—now being dubbed “crowdsourcing”—is sort of an interactive journalism, a kind of Web 2.0, Wikipedia model of media.

But even this kind of interactive journalism doesn’t allow people to tell their own stories or explore the subjects and angles they deem important, unfiltered and unmediated by “professionals” and their notions of respectable and responsible journalism. It doesn’t give the consumer access to the tools and technologies of journalism.

The first contemporary attempt by labor communicators to create a truly people-centered journalism was the establishment of the Independent Media Center in Seattle during the week of World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999. There, experienced journalists worked with activist newcomers to produce their own coverage of the events in video, audio, web and print formats. Their work helped push the mainstream media to adopt a more critical edge in its coverage and to even deal with the bigger globalization issues the protesters raised.

For several years, labor journalists have kicked around the idea of creating “labor media centers,” places to teach and empower rank-and-file workers to create their own media. ILCA vice presidents Howard Kling and Fred Glass published articles in the Winter 2003 issue of Labor Studies Journal updating the concept Glass first proposed in articles in the same journal in the 1980s. Both Glass, who is communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, and Kling, director of Labor Education Services at the University of Minnesota, are educators who do this kind of media training as a regular part of their jobs.

FULL story at link. Note the artwork by Ricardo Levins Morales (www.northlandposter.com). Northland was to close it's doors, then donations saved it.