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2 Alternate Paths in the Transition to Online Journalism (2000–2008) The Philly IMC, Philly Future, and the “Second Wave” of Online Journalism The Philadelphia branch of the Independent Media Center (IMC) movement, a network of more than 150 participatory media projects around the world, opened its doors in 2000 to cover protests at the Republican National Convention . One irony of the Philly IMC’s early journalistic success is that the organization was originally conceived as a limited, “tactical” media intervention documenting a rolling series of political protests. It was not originally seen as a permanent “citizen journalism” project per se.1 While it would be a mistake to identify the establishment of the Philly IMC with the “birth” of participatory journalism in Philadelphia, the questions raised by the Indymedia project are an unavoidable narrative thread that runs throughout my history of digital journalism in Philadelphia. Indeed, it might be useful to ask at this point: why study or discuss the Philly IMC at all in a book on digital journalism in Philadelphia? By the time this book was written, the Indymedia project of “being the media” and radical citizen journalism had largely been overtaken by new organizations at the center of the journalistic field. Organizationally, too, the Philly IMC was in disarray when I began to visit in the fall of 2007, and the project seemed as if it had ended by 2010. While many of the journalists I talked to remembered Indymedia, it was certainly not an organization they used as an source of information or spent much time thinking about. Why, then, is the history of the Philly IMC included in this tale? There are, I think, at least three reasons. The first is methodological: my project of following the actors across the local Philadelphia news network continually led me back to the assemblage of people, technology, and institutions that made up the original Independent Media Center of Philadelphia. The Norgs Unconfer- Alternate Paths in the Transition to Online Journalism (2000–2008) 35 ence of 2006 at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (discussed in Chapter 5), one of my first days of on-the-ground fieldwork, surprised me in its inclusion of members of the Philly IMC. The news stories I analyze here also intersected with news projects related to Indymedia, including the story of the Francisville Four that I trace in Chapter 4. A second reason for including the Philly IMC in this story is more substantive . Over time, it became clear to me that many of the transformations in journalistic work I was documenting could find their antecedents in practices and processes of the larger Indymedia movement of which the Philly IMC was a part. It is important to emphasize: this diffusion of newswork was not intentional or even a conscious process. Journalists working at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s breaking news desk did not deliberately model their reporting practices on those pioneered by radical journalists a few years earlier. But the strategies found precedents in earlier eras. A final point: the recent renewal of interest in activist technology use and digitally based “protest journalism,” spurred by the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and other such events, provides further evidence that the worlds of journalism , digital production, and social-movement protest are deeply enmeshed. The line here between the Philly IMC, Philly Future, blogs, and the Philly.com newsroom is not one of linear evolution or progressive descent, of course. Rather, it is a genealogical transformation full of breaks, stops, unexpected developments , and oblique movements. But there is movement, and only by including all of the relevant actors can that movement become clear. As has been documented extensively elsewhere,2 the Indymedia movement first leapt into public consciousness during anti–World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999, part of a growing wave of protests in the late 1990s against “corporate globalization.” According to its internal history, “The Indymedia project was started in late November of 1999, to allow participants in the anti-globalization movement to report on the protests against the WTO meeting that took place in Seattle, Washington, and to act as an alternative media source.”3 As the Christian Science Monitor noted in December 1999, the original IMC was “was sending hundreds of accounts from the riotous streets and orderly seminars to thousands tuning in around the globe. . . . [Indymedia] reporters are part-activist, part-journalist, and say their coverage will . . . serve as a role model for a...

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