Death in Oaxaca

On Friday, my colleague Brad Will of the NYC Indymedia was shot and killed by government backed paramilitaries in Oaxaca, Mexico. For the last five months, Oaxaca has been the scene of an escalating confrontation between the Oaxaca Teachers Union, under their umbrella organization the APPO, and the state government led by the corrupt PRI functionary state governor Ulises Ruiz . Today, the endgame in Oaxaca looked ready to begin as the Federal government of Vincente Fox, which until now had sat out the conflict, looked to use Will’s death as an excuse to break the protests for good.

There’s a sickening irony to that, because Brad was in full support of the APPO and the people of Oaxaca, and had gone down there as a journalist and human rights activists specifically to document their struggle against Ruiz. Part of me can’t help wondering if Brad was deliberately targeted by the paramilitaries to get Western journalists out of the way.

Here’s an email I sent to a bunch of the people about the situation:

"Brad was a friend and colleague of mine. He was a true citizen journalist. He did more than sit behind a laptop all day and pontificate about what he thought the news meant. He wasn’t an "official" member of any news organization, but he took his video camera and his notebook and traveled all over Latin America, providing passionate reporting about events and places few Americans knew (or cared) much about. In the past five years, he has committed more acts of journalism than many paid, "professional" journalists. He was killed today, as a journalist. 
We’ll all miss him in NYC very much.
chris"

A number of people and professors in my doctoral program and in the NORG’s group have sent emails of sympathy; thanks so much to all of them for the kind words. The Houston Chronicle had a great story on this that quoted Jay Rosen, and Jeff Jarvis has a nice post on this too.

Brad’s death shows us the importance of journalism– no matter who does it– as an important tool of social justice and witness. Brad: !Presente!

Not-Liveblogging the Blogs and Politics Event at NYU

I attended the October 25 "Blogs and Politics" event at NYU, and couldn’t liveblog it (as I had planned) because there wasn’t any wireless. So I took really detailed notes instead. Here they are.

Some other attendees at the talk blogged about it themselves. They include Liza Sabater

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7:00 Can”t liveblog– no wireless, at least, not anything thats available to non NYU peons like me.

7:03 The people here look like people who desperately care about “Blogs and Politics,” which, of course, happens to be the title of this panel, sponsored by the NYU Law Dems and DL2LC. The crowd here looks like a slightly less self-assured, slightly more awkward version of a crowd that would be comfortable hanging out in various  bookstores in Washington DC. . I need to come up with a name for this particular type of audience, the type of wonky audience I know really cares about this shit, but whom I would never encounter either at Indymedia or at Columbia in quite the same way.

7:06 Survey says: most visited blogs, 4 out of 5 (at least) are side projects of the mainstream media; Room8 (what’s that??) seems to be the only real exception (maybe). So much for the end of professional journalism as we know it. So much for an insurgent band outsiders crashing the gates. Maybe this is a particularly NYC thing?

“On the Media,” On Iraqi Bloggers and Journalists

Great piece from "On the Media" on the new– and tenuous– world of Iraqi journalism.

Interview with the Bwoggers

Anyone with a cable TV channel or who cares about the goings-on at America’s universities has probably heard something about the Minuteman protest that erupted at Columbia University on October 4th.  The protest and ruckus that followed, which led to the cancellation of the planned address by Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, quickly becamse a referundum on campus free speech and racism in the anti-illegal immigrant movement.

Not surprisingly, the best coverage of the entire affair has come, not from Columbia’s official student newspaper The Spectator (The Spec), but from an unofficial campus blog, called The Bwog.

Intriged by this act of citizens’ journalism on my very own campus, I took it upon myself to interview a Bwog reporter Lydia DePillis and the website’s editor-in-chief Avi Zenilman. I was interested in getting a taste of what real life campus bloggers in the middle of a huge story thought about themselves and what they were doing. On a textual level was intrigued by how the seriousness of the Minuteman story was co-existing (sometime uncomfortably) with Bwog’s oft-irrverent aditutde. I was also curious to see how the Bwog staff saw their relationship with the Spec, and what they thought CU students thought about journalism in general. Sometimes, its easy to get caught up in a bunch of journalism theory and loose sight of what’s actually happening on the ground.

The interview (conducted via email) follows.  Folks interested in learning more about blogging and networked journalism on college campuses should check out Innovation in College Media, a website run by my colleague Bryan Murley and a few others. Its by far the best source of discussion about college journalism on the web.

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Chris Anderson: What is The Bwog? What is its relationship with the print publication
"The Blue and the White?"

Lydia DePillis: The Bwog launched in February of 2006 as a source for campus news and
gossip with a light, funny, sometimes irreverent tone. It’s partly
reader driven, in that anyone can send in tips and ideas for posts, and
partly staff driven, in that we work hard to commission more considered
features with a high level of writing. It’s run by the staff of The
Blue and White, but the Bwog recieves no funding from the
University–which means we have complete editorial freedom, unlike the
magazine.

Avi Zenilman: The Bwog is the online manifestation of The Blue and White,
Columbia’s monthly magazine. It was launched in February 2006; we took
some features from the magazine (gossip, digitalia, lecture hopping,
arts reviews) and put them in blog form. It was meant to be smart,
breezy, cheeky–and, in a campus where there is only one publication
that comes out more than once a month, an alternative source of
information and procrastination. We used "Columbia Gawker" to describe
the project before finding a name. The Bwog’s content comes from
mish-mash of Blue and White writers (some who hate blogs), staffers who
are either detailed specifically to bwog, daily bwog editors, and,
naturally, our readers. Unlike The Blue and White print edition, it
does not receive any funding for Columbia–which makes our lives
easier. The relationship between print and online is still unclear–The
Bwog comes out more frequently, has a wider readership and the writers
work harder for it on a day to day basis, but I think there’s something
about the closedness and definitiveness of a closely edited magazine
that makes it more central to The Blue and White. Also, right now, I
think the magazine does a better job of reporting on the intellectual
content of academic life, but I’m sure Bwog will catch up soon.

CWA: How did The Bwog prepare to cover the speech of Minuteman founder Jim
Gilchrist to the Columbia community? Have you covered controversial
campus speakers before? How was this similar / different?

LdP: We prepared to cover Jim Gilchrist’s appearance just like any other
event, not knowing how it would blow up. As it became apparent that the
protest outside was not your average Columbia snit fit, Bwog daily
editor Sara Vogel and I teamed up to take pictures, and I took my
laptop inside the Auditorium when the event started to post as it
progressed. We haven’t really covered things live before, and I’m not
sure why we decided to do it this time. It was an exciting atmosphere,
with lots of media, and we wanted to be first to break what went on
inside.

We’ve had our share of controversy, but mostly over things
like found objects with swastikas scrawled on them (see our April
archives for details on that).