Changing Media Landscape

The photo below is an indication of how much the media landscape has changed in the past few years. For the pictured event the United Workers emailed only one press release to the daily paper of record and local television media.  The result: Only one traditional outlet covered the event, a far cry from coverage in the past. The other result: Over 500 people marched through Baltimore to the worker-declared human rights zoneat the Inner Harbour.
 
More than the number of people who came to the event, there were other results to inattention to traditional media, or to sending out only one emailed press release.  A story was filed on Free Speech Radio News, the Indypendent Reader covered the event, MMP covered the event, at least four independent videos were distributed of the event, and bloggers reported on the event in real time. (Note: I am a leadership organizer with the United Workers. This blog entry, originally posted on my personal blog, represents my views and may not reflect the views of the United Workers as an organization.)

In the past, the United Workers would have sent out three releases, including one that would of been hand delivered in the form of some kind of gimmicky device (like a shoe full of poverty wage peanutsfor a protest at a baseball stadium, or an empty soup can for a hunger strike). If our audience had been the traditional media, the event itself would of needed to be short, highly staged, with around 50 participants (not 500), been at 10 AM (best on a Tuesday or Thursday), and have only one highly stylized and simplified message (not a series of solidarity stopsthroughout the downtown with more of a theme than a message for the day). Advance work would of gone to coaching spokespersons on talking points, instead of intense high level strategic planning sessions to prepare for the movement building event held on the day after the march. Also, had our audience been the traditional media, the United Workers would likely not have been able to take a lead on organizing a community fair with over 100 community leaders, since traditional media management is just too intense of an activity to try both at one time.

A lot has changed in my work as a community organizer, which started as a communications activist in the early 1990s. What I learned as an organizer first came from my experience as an ACT UP activist, during the group's waning years. I started working with ACT UP following its peak, after the hugely effective and graphically powerful actions and media stunts in response to Reagan's gay-hating and poverty ignoring neglect in responding to the AIDS crisis. I worked with a small group of activists who were skilled at carrying a single message through mainstream media filters, but who knew little of community organizing, institution building and transformative politics. The people I worked with were intensely effective media activists, but did not know how to work in co-operation with others (or, if they knew, did not practice co-operation). This is one reason why I left the world of radical activism torn up and radicalized with little in the way of nurturing or political grounding, confused and angry and totally lost. I also left skilled at getting a cause in the news and knowing how to use traditional media filters to great advantage. I left understanding the power of perception politics, how to get it and how to use it.

I was in my very early twenties when I gave up on activism, burnt out from my first experience as an activist in what I misunderstood as radical politics and community organizing. If not for a good friend, who had skipped this burn out experience, I don't know if I would have learned that there was a distinction between activism and organizing and would of ever come back to radical political work. I don't know if I would of learned that in organizing is deeply rewarding work and nurturing spaces for being part of community. After my crash landing with ACT UP, I took refuge in merely watchingthe work of my best friend for a few years while I recovered from what I experienced as an activist. His work was with a poor people's organization and came to be focused on leadership development of the poor in order to build a movement to end poverty. I eventually returned to the the work of radical politics, overcoming my first experience of political alienation through (ironically) political activism.

I shifted from burnt out activist to community organizer. But I kept my core skills of media activism with me, which didn't have much of a role in the poor people's organizing until much later in the work because the first steps of this work took place in homeless shelters, outside of temp agencies, at prayer circles and through home visits and conversations with low-wage workers. But when there was a need for perception power to secure the specific demand within the context of a campaign, the skills I learned in the early 1990s finally could be re-deployed in context of my work. That was in 2007, again at the tail end of an era but this time the end the era of the traditional media, centring on the local daily paper of record, as the central and most relevant force in the management of political perceptions. I think it's very likely that 2007 will end up being the final stop for the use of the local daily paper of record (and by extension local television amplification of the daily paper of record) to build power or get widely heard. The media landscape of the early 1990s had totally shifted in the fifteen years following, and the traditional media landscape that likely peaked in the 1990s is now gone. The institutions of that time, especially at the local level, are no longer relevant, rendering many of the skills I learned as an AIDS activist obsolete to this work.

In 2007 the United Workers successfully secured the demand for a living wage at Camden Yards, a victory made possible in part because the traditional media in Baltimore were still relevant enough to help shape perception (or least to shape perception of perception, as a shadow of its formal self still functioning in the minds of the powerful). The victory was leveraged on perception power, patronage power and labour power developed through a three year process of community organizing and leadership development. Perception and patronage were in part built though effective use of the traditional media to carry a message. Campaign plans initially developed in 2002-03, when it was uncertain whether the old media machine centred largely on the local daily paper of record would survive the shifts in media economics, were finally deployed. It still made sense to assume in 2002-03 that by the time of victory there would still be a local daily paper of record. So much changed in the three years following the planning stages for the original plan to be almost ill-fated, with traditional media at near death by time it was to have a role in winning the campaign.

I think that 2007 may prove to be an end point of relevancy for the local traditional media, with the local daily paper no longer the central force (perhaps not even a network node) in shaping what's news and what gets heard. This means that the local daily paper is as good as dead, because it makes little sense to bank on it for influencing perceptions in the future, meaning that it makes little sense to direct resources at feeding stories to the local daily paper, or to pay much attention to its institutional cravings, any longer. In the early 1990s much of what I did and thought in terms of getting ideas out to the wider public and power players was based on ways to get an idea or message through the traditional media filter and have the message remain intact (in terms what I wanted told). Now, my thinking has shifted to figuring out how to message directly (so that participants on all sides directly witness an experience aimed at carrying the message or building power), how to contribute to the development of independent news networks to reach allies, share ideas (thankfully, minus the de-filtering measures of the past) and speak to the opposition through indirect means, and in imagining how local power structures will manage to communicate without the local daily paper of record being relevant to the shaping and sharing of ideas.

No matter how much work any major change requires, it is liberating at one level to remove local daily papers of record, local commercial radio and local television from the organizer's Rolodex. I am grateful that messaging and organizing now exist on the same plane, that mobilizing for an event results in ideas being directly experienced and heard, and how power is demonstrated without relaying in the complex filters and smoke screens that traditional media messaging once required. Removing those filters makes for more honest, deeper, and more nuanced messaging. It also shifts messaging to the side lines, and puts dialogue in its place. Because the traditional media is now, for the most part and for all effective purposes, irrelevant to community organizing I can see how resources that once went to influencing newsroom editors can be freed up and for those resources to go to much deeper processes within our own communities.  
 
Cross posted on my blog.

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