[Imc-web] Policy on Featuring Announcements

[Mike Lehman]

I want to raise a couple of concerns about featuring announcements. 
First, I've seen no messages regarding Brian Dolinar's two stories being 
made into features, as they should be sent to this list per policy.

The main issue is that both stories are basically announcements and 
really offer little new info about either long-running story. It has 
been our policy for some time that announcements should not be featured, 
with exceptions being available for IMC events. If an announcement 
provides substantive new info related to an ongoing story, then an 
exception can be made, but I don't really see that in either of these 
cases -- and if it exists, it should be noted in the feature email sent 
to imc-web when that is done.

Another factor is that we now have the "Upcoming Events" news wire that 
provides even more exposure than simply offering Local Newswire space 
for announcements.

Brian sent me a message about featuring both of these a few days ago. I 
have noted current policy on this to him before and advised him that I 
didn't think either really qualified for an exception. I also advised 
him that he should send such requests to the imc-web list, so that more 
people could be involved in making such decisions, rather than making 
personal requests of individual editors without input from others. I 
haven't seen such a message.

I also advised Brian that he could move his stories up to the Upcoming 
Events newswire, just so long as he added a date to the headline. I went 
to the trouble of explaining what he needed to do, since when he's 
signed in as a regular user, this means he won't be so dependent on 
waiting for us to fix issues with his many stories.

If people think we should review the existing policy, then we should 
meet and do that. At a minimum, such requests should be made to the 
imc-web list and any decisions made to feature them should be documented 
with a message from the editor doing so back to the imc-web list, giving 
the reasons why an exception should be made.

Please note that this in no way constitutes a judgment about the 
importance of either event or action. It's just that this issue has a 
long history that may not be apparent to all of those with current 
editor privileges. It has always been somewhat of a problem with people 
being motivated to use our site for announcements, but being far less 
motivated to file an actual news story afterwards telling our readers 
what actually happened. I know we take a very wide view of what 
constitutes news on Indymedia, but there is a clear difference between 
that and an announcement that I think is worth respecting. If nothing 
else, then we're going to start receiving complaints from those whose 
announcements did not get featured, as well as filling up the feature 
section with stuff that isn't really news.

A final factor to consider is syndication. Right now, I don't think it's 
working, so it's not an issue, but we really do desperately need to get 
it working. Then, anything that is an announcement here will be even 
less suitable for syndication. If you review what is featured elsewhere 
in Indymedia, you'll see that other IMCs follow a policy on featuring 
announcements that is very similar to our existing policy. In any case, 
there is little additional value in syndicating announcements -- and it 
would tend to make US Indymedia a far more boring read and less 
compelling to return to, for instance, if it was full of mostly locally 
oriented announcements like those I've been discussing here.

I realize this is a complicated issue with a number of nuances that are 
hard to address via email. I think it might be good to have a meeting, 
if there is a perceived need to change the existing policy. But in the 
meantime, I think existing policy has served us well and I request that 
we try to follow it as best possible in the meantime.
Mike Lehman