[Imc-newsroom] Re: [Imc] Batten Award

[John Wason]

At 07:11 PM 11/27/2001 +0100, Michael Feltes wrote:

>It seems to me, from reading the descriptions of what they'd like to see,
>that we'd be best served submitting our best Newshour, our best print article,
>and our best discussion on the Newswire.  I'm thinking about volunteering to
>coordinate this, but since I'm a relative newcomer to the group, the IMC's
>memories are not my memories, and I can't just think back and pull out old
>stories that were some of our best efforts.  If someone could help me with
>suggestions of old Newshours to pull out and listen to, and old threads on the
>Newswire that were particularly good examples of how open publishing works best
>(we may want to suggest to the global lists that we submit from the Global
>Newswire, as there seems to be a much higher volume of responses to
articles), I
>would definitely be willing to write up the nominating letters, edit down
>the Newshour to the 10 minute highlights, and pull it all together with a neat
>little bow.

Thanks for the most generous offer, Mike.  But before anyone gets their
shorts in too much of a twist over this, know that I phoned the good folks
at the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in Washington DC today, just for the
hell of it.  I spoke to a woman named Dana Felty about the James K. Batten
Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism (which, by the way, are in their
final year).

I explained to Ms. Felty who we are - that we of the Urbana-Champaign IMC
are the very ESSENCE of civic journalism, that we exist by virtue of
voluntary contributions and volunteer labor, that our mission is to empower
ordinary citizens to present perspectives that may be different from those
of the corporately-owned media, etc., etc. She was familiar, she said, with
the concept of indymedia.

I mainly just wanted to find out whether we could submit a body of work that
would incorporate everything we do: the web site, the radio news hour, and
the newspaper.  But here's the exquisite irony:

Ms. Felty told me that we don't qualify for the award at all!  Mr. Batten
created the award to "reward news organizations that are pressured by daily
deadlines" - I wrote it down - to go beyond those pressures and do something
extraordinary in terms of civic journalism.  In other words, the purpose of
the award, she said, was to "light a fire" under the corporate media to do
outstanding civic journalism.

So since we're not corporate media and we're not under the "pressure of
daily deadlines", it appears that we don't qualify for the civic journalism
award as defined. Apparently the corporations need the monetary incentives
more than we do. 

In fairness, Mr. Batten probably didn't envision the indymedia phenomenon
when he created the award, though I would think the board of directors could
take it into consideration.  Ms. Felty - who was a nice person, I should add
- did say that we in the indymedia movement "perform a valuable function in
challenging the corporate media to do a better job."  I thanked her
profusely for the vote of confidence, as you might imagine, which was easily
worth $25,000.  She also mentioned that there are "other sources of funding"
out there in GrantLand, though she didn't suggest any specific ones for
which we might qualify.

I'm not making any of this up.  But if anyone wants to double-check the
information I'm presenting here, feel free to phone the Pew Center at (202)
331-3200 and ask for Dana Felty.  You won't find this stuff I'm telling you
spelled out on the Pew Center's web site, and had I not called we might have
done a whole ton of work for absolutely nothing.

Disgustedly,

John

P.S.  As an aside, I've been unable to locate photos of the Ladies and
Laddies Against War ANYWHERE to date.  It seems that the Powers on High
don't want those folks' pitchers took for some reason.  :)  If anyone wants
to take their photos, or knows where some might be located, it would be most
helpful.