I’m talking about intellectual diversity: the ways in which MCDM students and faculty approach and solve problems, skills and abilities applied in novel and meaningful ways, and outcomes that far exceed my admittedly high expectations. The student work from Fall 2011′s COM 546 Foundations course - Narratives & Networks in Digital Media – exemplifies both the challenges and the opportunities that true diversity can provide.

Course Background

As a foundational course to the MCDM program, Narratives & Networks in Digital Media had the unique position of orienting Cohort 11 students both to the theory and also the application of many elements they will encounter in the program. Taking a bit of their own advice, this course was newly revamped for 2011, and co-taught by MCDM Director Hanson Hosein and Dr. Malcolm Parks. The result for this first incarnation? Engaging discussions, relevant lectures and guest-speakers, and tangible takeaways for professionals and creatives, alike.

Students in this course witnessed the rise of the Occupy movement, the start of the upcoming nomination and election season, and the death of Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, they engaged with new tools and platforms, tried valiantly to “publish then filter,” and were brought together in new and sometimes challenging ways. Students were exposed to basic principles of digital media, and become comfortable with the central tenet of the MCDM: to effect trusted and persuasive communication, professionals need to develop a compelling narrative tied to strategic network engagement.

With this post, we would like to share some of their work, some of the process, and some of the core philosophies of the MCDM program.

Binaries

Human beings are wired for a binary world – but not the digital binary of 0s and 1s. Rather, as humans move through their world, they inherently seek out and identify similarities and differences with the people, places, and ideas they encounter. This identification process helps us to navigate the tricky waters of modern existence by leveraging our past experiences. While this process has become an evolutionary necessity, it can also keep us from broadening our horizons and hinder our development.

In the wild – or the wilds of the workplace – being able to quickly identify something, reference it against our experience, and decide a course of action is a matter of survival. In the classroom, however, facing these tensions head-on can mean the difference between going through the motions or finding a breakthrough moment. This course was designed to leverage this human tendency to both expose students to new views on topics they were familiar with while simultaneously including topics and tools they hadn’t seen before.

As with much of the MCDM, students were given a chance to apply these new experiences in both individual and group settings.

Go Team!

In this course, students were allowed to choose a topic that resonated with them for the individual assignments. This resulted in people pursuing topics they were passionate about – but left the instructional team with a significant challenge when it came to group work: How to go about creating groups that will have enough tension to thoroughly explore an issue, but retain enough cohesion to complete the assignment?

Group work is rarely easy – yet it has become a fixture of our modern lives. This “team” mentality abounds at the workplace and at home, but despite its prevalence, the challenges remain. Learning to work together – especially when there are significant differences amongst group members – is essential. These classroom experiences offer students a chance to take risks in the name of education, where the consequences are minimized and the feedback and engagement is maximized. They are actively encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zone, both individually and in groups.

The only caveat: if you fail, fail forward.

Applied Examination

For the group assignment, students were tasked with creating:

[a] ten-minute class group presentation that gets to the heart of your story strategy, and how you engaged networked community to spread the word. This presentation should ideally incorporate a short, sharable piece of multimedia content (visual or audible) that can serve as a demonstrable artifact for your overall project. You’ll also include examples from your blogs, strategy papers, and class content. You’ll be subject to a 10-20 minute class Q&A and discussion.

Not only would students need to address their own individual applications of the principles of digital media, but they would have to create a set of packaged, compelling, cross-project narratives exploring these issues more deeply. This is truly a difficult challenge, requiring students bring to bear not only the tools and techniques they had been exposed to over the course of the quarter, but also their own experiences, talents, and skills to approach this multi-faceted problem.

Group Selection

The formation of class groups is always a challenge for the instructor. On the one hand, do you simply let the students choose their own group, and let them live with their own choices? Or, should group selection be seen as a chance to encourage students to engage with new viewpoints, individuals, and challenges that they may not choose for themselves?

In this case, I was tasked with forming the groups. Each student had submitted a one paragraph description of their Action Idea – the central narrative thread the compels both their strategy and their content. I had a good sense of who each of the 48 students were, how they interacted, and had seen some of their work product.

The real challenge was creating consistent group sizes while knowing that student’s individual topics were set. On top of that, I wanted to create opportunities for students to work with some new ideas and new peers – i.e. not the people they sat next to every week in class. Diversity amongst group members – again, talking about intellectual diversity as well – was key. Instead of creating a group that would essentially say the same thing four different ways, I worked to form groups whose overarching themes may not be so readily apparent. While I knew that the students were capable, I was pleasantly surprised with the final products.

Outcomes

The “Family” group featured one student sharing her grandmother’s photos, memories, and thoughts on a blog called Upload Your Grandma. Another student was exploring life as a 20-something who had moved back home after college.  Yet others found themselves facing challenges as a modern-day father, a mother to her children and caretaker to her parents, and one living in “the real modern family.” These individual narratives combined to paint a very compelling picture of what it means to be a part of a family today.

Featuring one blog about eating gluten-free in Seattle, one about learning to cook, one featuring the MilkBread Monster, and one about bees, the “Conscientious Consumption” team put together a great take on what, how, and why we eat – or don’t – in America today:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another group of students combined nature, boxing, robots, and collaboration to help expose kids to leadership opportunities:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet another group leveraged their diverse backgrounds and topics to tackle Taboo Conversations:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moving Forward

Through a combination of theory and practice, familiar and new, individual and collective, MCDM students find new and exciting ways to see their world, tell the stories they find compelling, and build and grow the communities that will make a difference for us all. Just as our students continue to grow and evolve, so does the program. If you have any questions about the MCDM program, please don’t hesitate to reach out  by email, on Twitter, on Facebook, or by phone at (206)-543-6745.

Related Posts

• April 21, 2011 -- Greg Mortenson and Leadership Narrative Lies (12)
• December 20, 2011 -- The Power of People and Story (1)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• April 13, 2011 -- Make The Change (1)
• September 21, 2010 -- Going Epic regarding the Future We Make (4)

When the news broke last month that a Mexican blogger nicknamed “Rascatripas” (Gut Scratcher) had been killed by Mexican drug cartel “Los Zetas,” it sent a chilling message to journalists not just in Mexico, but around the world. It happened only days after members of the powerful computer hacking group Anonymous declared a short-lived war on the drug cartels in response to the kidnapping of one of their own members in Veracruz.

During an operation called PaperStorm, Anonymous hacktivists threatened via a video message to expose the Zetas and their closest inside sources if their fellow Anonymous member wasn’t released. Although the blogger was set free the day after, he brought a cryptic message back from the Zetas: “For every contributor you expose we will kill ten innocent people.” After much debate online about the ramifications of innocent lives lost, operation PaperStorm was subsequently cancelled.

But “Rascatripas,” who worked separately from Anonymous, openly refused to give up his attempts to write about and expose members of the cartel.

Less than a month later his body was found decapitated under a bridge in Nuevo Laredo.

To put things in perspective, violence in Mexico is believe to have caused more than 45,000 deaths since 2006. Just yesterday morning, 16 people were shot dead in the state of Veracruz in a drug cartel turf war.

Online blogger Rascatripas was found next to a note that read "With this note, I say goodbye to Nuevo Laredo Live. Always remember, never forget, my handle, "Rascatripas.""

No one is safe

According to the left-wing Mexican newspaper La Jornada, the journalist death toll by the hands of drug cartels in the last decade now stands at 74, with many of them coming during the term of current President Felipe Calderón. But those statistics don’t include bloggers, which could raise the total significantly higher. In the past three months alone, four bloggers who were known for writing about the cartels, all of them residents of Nuevo Laredo, have met violent deaths.

In September, two presumed social media moderators (a man and a woman) were found hanging from a bridge showing evident signs of torture. The man’s shoulder was severed and the woman was disembowled. A written warning was found adjacent to the gruesome discovery reading “This will happen to those’ tweeters,’ be smart I have an eye on you,” signed by “Z.” Likewise in September, the body of another blogger, Marisol Macias Castaneda, was found in the same spot as “Rascatripas” corpse. She was also beheaded. Both were moderators of the Nuevo Laredo en Vivo blog.

The risk of tangling with the cartels online has become so grave that certain bloggers in Mexico created a website directly advising readers about the dangers they could face for browsing information about cartels online. It’s now widely presumed that the Mexican cartels have their own computer specialists and hackers who track IP addresses for journalists and members of the online media. This makes reporting on crime in Mexico, even if you’re not working at a newspaper, a potentially deadly decision.

So who are the people behind these killings?

The Zetas are a paramilitary gang whose members are mostly deserters of a Mexican Armed Forces elite group who didn’t begin as drug-traffickers at all. In the late 1990s members of the group were recruited as hitmen for the Gulf Cartel headed by Osiel Cardenas Guillen. Shortly after Guillen was arrested in 2003, the Zetas became a cartel of their own when selling drugs eventually became too lucrative of a business to ignore. Because of the Zetas high-end military and tactical training, they’ve quickly become one of the most violent and elusive drug cartels ever assembled.

A prominent political journalist, who also asked not to be identified in this article, thinks that the severity of the problem actually began several years earlier. “We owe this whole mess to former President Vicente Fox, who took the death penalty for the military deserters off the table in 2005,” she states. “Now who will defend us?

Taking precautions

The panorama has changed a lot in the last 20 years for many of us who cover news. These days each of us is our own digital media outlet. We don’t need permission to get our voices heard through the Internet. But in Mexico it seems that both reporters at traditional news outlets and “citizen journalists” are not just facing censorship from the authorities, but now risk of being tracked and killed because of their work.

Beyond journalists, one of the most at-risk groups at the moment are hackers and computer engineers, who have been forcibly hired or kidnapped by drug-traffickers to do their dirty laundry, from credit card cloning to identity theft and code breaking.

The case of Fernando Ernesto Villegas Alvarez is well-known. A 24-year-old student of computer engineering at the National Polytechnic Institute (Instituto Politecnico Nacional, IPN) in Mexico City, was hired as a tech support intern for a company named Productos Foca. Later on, Fernando was taken by the same company to Acapulco Beach, in the state of Guerrero, to work on another project. While there, the Mexican Marshalls conducted a raid, and arrested Fernando. It was until after his arrest that he knew his employer was Edgar “La Barbie” Villareal, the head of a Mexican drug cartel himself.

Mexican independent journalist J.M. believes that Mexicans need to understand the concept of privacy regarding the Internet and social media usage. “More frequently than not, I see that people make their personal information public, such as phone numbers, real location, address, date of birth, etc.,” J.M. says. “I sadly remember the day in which the family of an active member of the military, who was killed during the capture of a drug lord, was peppered with bullets. The [Mexican] media glorified him as a hero without protecting his identity and that of his family members. It was like handing [his family] to the criminals on a silver platter.”

The story J.M. is referencing is that of Mexican marine Melquisedet Angulo Cordova who was dubbed a hero after being gunned down on December 16, 2009 during a raid in the city of Cuernavaca aimed at capturing prominent drug lord, Arturo Beltran Leyva who was shot to death along with six of his hitmen. Cordova’s image appeared everywhere on the nightly news. Television programs showed the home where Cordova was raised and resides with his mother and two brothers.

Just hours after Cordova was honored as a national hero’s at his funeral by the Navy on December 21st, that same evening his mother, two brothers, his sister and an aunt were brutally killed at their home. According to an article from Mexican newspaper El Universal, Los Zetas were believed to be behind the family assassination.

“According to police sources, the suspected hitmen that had executed the family of the marine belong to ‘Los Zetas’ group, who operate in Tabasco and who were also allies of Beltran Leyva.”

The message is that anyone fighting against the drug cartels who doesn’t protect their privacy can and will be killed. The same goes for those who reveal too much information on social networking sites like Facebook and Hi5.com.

On June 2008, the son of Mexican tycoon Alejandro Marti–former owner of Mexican sporting goods chain store Marti and SportCity gym–was kidnapped in Mexico City. Even though the ransom was paid to the captors, the body of 14 year old Fernando was found inside a trunk almost two months after his kidnapping. Autopsy reports shown that Fernando had been dead for over a month prior to the discovery of his remains. The perpetrators, a gang so-called “Los Petricholet,” were arrested a year later and charged with 14 kidnappings and eight murders. Some members of the criminal gang are federal police officers.

This case brought increasingly media attention, because it had touched one of the wealthiest families in Mexico. It was implied by many media outlets that Fernando Marti’s information was open to everyone on the Hi5 social media site and that is in fact how the kidnappers located him in the first place. Journalist Victor Hugo Michel, contributor for Milenio magazine, wrote in his article Virtual Net, Database for Kidnappers:

“Before his murder was confirmed, Fernando Marti’s personal information was, without his consent, a public good. Thanks to the internet, his identity was available for whatever stranger to obtain certain inteligence about his habits, lifestyle and closest friends.”

And he inisisted, “Days after his death, personal photographs of young Marti started circulating around the Mexican media and other websites, apparently they have been extracted out of his Hi5 account, but without his parents consent. After the invasion to the family’s privacy, the account was deleted.”

Brave Reporters

At the top of the story, there’s an image with the pictures of five journalist who have disappeared or have died due to writing about the drug cartels. At present, all five have been confirmed as dead. Dolores Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla worked for radio station XHNOE in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco was an editorialist and co-founder of the weekly publication Zeta in Tijuana, Baja California. Alfredo Jimenez Mota was a reporter at El Imparcial newspaper in Hermosillo, Sonora. Mauricio Estrada Zamora was a reporter at La Opinion de Apatzingan, Apatzingan, Michoacan and Rafael Ortiz Martinez was a reporter at Zocalo a newspaper in Monclova, Coahuila. All five of these reporters and media hounds died for publishing material that the cartels did not like.

Despite how dangerous reporting on narco traffickers currently is for those who work in social and digital media, there are still some brave souls that are fighting to expose the facts. Below is a list of several websites in English and Spanish featuring reporting from both trained and citizen journalists who risk their lives to make sure the truth is told.

The LA Times Narco Project

The site above features interactive maps for major drug cartel interactions and well-detailed articles on all things related to drug trafficking in Mexico.

Blog Del Narco

Perhaps the most popular site in Mexico for news on drug trafficking.

Mundo Narco

Another good website with citizen journalists listing everything they can online in an effort to “out” the cartels.

NPR: Mexico’s Drug War

This is a great read on the surge in drug cartel activity in Mexico.

Related Posts

• June 10, 2009 -- and the most influential person is… (0)

Throughout much of autumn, near anarchy filled the streets of Athens as that country’s austerity bill as voted upon and photographers/videographers captured lot’s of captivating footage during those melees. It appears the honchos at Fox News thought nobody would notice if they made the protests in Moscow look more violent than they really are. I haven’t seen this anywhere on the New York Times’ Media Decoder or Poynter.org yet, so I’m hesitant to call it 100% true, but the video above doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Related Posts

• September 12, 2011 -- Seattle Times Makes Poynter Institute’s Sept. 11 List (0)
• December 4, 2009 -- The Globalization of Casual Games (5)

I am not brave.

People have said that I am, but I’m not. I am surviving cancer the only way I know how – by leaning on others. When I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic lymphoma I had a secure job, health insurance and an arsenal of family and friends ready to step in with anything I might need. Mine has not always been a graceful journey, but it is one I shared with the family, friends and people I don’t even know who have reached out to carry me in my moments of weakness.

Whether you are my parents, who paid for $8000 in fertility treatments to ensure I could have kids someday, my boyfriend who held me during more than one emotional meltdown, or someone who is taking a moment to read my blog and listen, you have had a hand in my survival. I am alive today because of you.

As I near the end of my treatment, I would like to help those who are not as lucky I am by establishing a new non-profit for cancer patients age 18-30. And MCDM community, this is where I need your help.

Being in your 20′s and having cancer comes with its own special challenges. Many of us have just recently moved out on our own, but might not be too financially stable yet. If we are employed, we may not have a plush salary or cushy benefits. We are less likely to have health insurance.

But besides the financial burden that cancer brings, I believe cancer takes a unique emotional toll on young adults as well. When I was diagnosed with cancer I was in graduate school and aggressively chasing my career goals. I hoped to soon get married and eventually have children. But cancer halted all of these dreams. I have watched my friends get promoted at work, plan weddings and stay out late dining and drinking with other 20-somethings while I was in chemotherapy, having blood transfusions and watching my hair fall out.

There’s no good time to have cancer. But as a young adult, this disease is especially challenging. So my non-profit organization will support newly-diagnosed cancer patients from age 18 to 30.

The idea comes from an incredible organization founded in my own neighborhood of West Seattle - Northwest Hope & Healing. This group provides “healing baskets” filled with comforting items to newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients as well as non-medical financial aid to those struggling under the burden of medical costs. I know from personal experience how crucial both kinds of support can be when you are facing a cancer diagnosis and I believe that developing a similar organization under the guidance of Northwest Hope & Healing could greatly serve young adults with cancer.

But I need help! Right now this nameless organization is sorely in need of a marketing guru, someone to create a promotional video, legal advice, a web designer and anyone who has an idea for fundraising or collecting in-kind donations.

Maybe because you’ve offered it in the past, or simply because you will listen, I am asking you to help me help others who will be facing those terrifying words “you have cancer” when they should be starting their careers, their families, their lives.

Because cancer would be unbearable if it were not for people like you.

I am hosting a meeting for those who want to get involved on Sunday, November 27. If you are interested, please email me.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• January 18, 2012 -- MCDM Town Hall on Sunday (0)
• January 17, 2012 -- Why I think CES matters (3)
• January 9, 2012 -- Trying to be Chic AND Geek for the Consumer Electronics Show (0)
• January 4, 2012 -- May your New Year be full of data! (0)

So here I am again, with another infographic. I mean seriously: how could we pass up an infographic on social media? It’s such an integral part of the MCDM, that we just had to give this one props…

Being a student in the MCDM, this little gem is particularly relevant to me. Social media is the new employment currency, and I plan to leverage my social media know-how in my future bid for gainful employment. So I looked this one over pretty thoroughly. While some of the advice–such as leaving debauchery off your public Facebook page– is (or should be) pretty obvious, the information is generally solid, and the design is well-thought-out.

Having read “The 5 Minute Guide,” I feel as though I understand a little better what the different social media job titles actually mean, and what a reasonable salary range for each is. Which, come graduation-time, might just be a good thing…

The full-size graphic is available at http://www.mindflash.com/blog/2011/08/the-5-minute-guide-to-getting-a-job-in-social-media/?view=mindflashgraphic

Related Posts

• February 2, 2012 -- The Benefits of Studying Abroad (Infographic) (1)
• January 17, 2012 -- Why I think CES matters (3)
• December 5, 2011 -- Infographic–Google (5)
• October 20, 2011 -- Never Leave Home: A Flip the Media InfoGraphic by Peter Kim (2)
• October 11, 2011 -- Sexists, Bad Tippers, and Jerks of the World Beware: the Internet Will Catch You (11)

A video of highlights from the conversation with MCDM students and a complete transcript are available on the KCTS 9 website.

According to Sreenivasan, who is a proponent of the growing “slow news” movement, “The value of breaking news is going down faster than you can post it.”

Sreenivasan’s basic message is that there is no point in trying to compete with the wire services on breaking a story. It is more important to be accurate than first. “Do people remember who broke the story first? Hardly. But they will remember if you get it wrong,” Sreenivasan pointed out.

Emphasizing an anyscreen/anytime approach Sreenivasan says: “70 to 85 percent of my job is to move NewsHour to news consumers who don’t come to the six o´clock news show.” Noting that he doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel or create channels, he continues “The challenge is to use the tech tools to distribute the news content to where the audience is already. With Tivo we have gotten used to watching the content at different times than when it airs. Now we are getting used to getting the content where we want it. The challenge is to create a story that is when and where you want it to be and still (be) relevant.”

“iPad, iPhone, TV, online… Share content – so much of the YouTube content that PBS produces is embedded in shared content”, Sreenivasan says.  The NewsHour also increases the value of slow news in the digital world by building widgets and storify versions of the news.

For instance, during the Gulf oil spill in 2010, PBS built a web site widget where users could plug in their guess of how much oil was gushed into the ocean each hour. Later that fall, when full body scans were introduced a various American airports, they built a widget that tracked added wait times at TSA checkpoints for 52 airport. All of this was done with almost no overhead budget.

“I don’t care where you see my content. But I want to get my content to where you are already,” Sreenivasan says.

Sreenivasan argues that one of the most important tasks of journalists working in professional media is to help people cut through the clutter. “Sending a link is lazy. There is value in blog posts that save time, that summarize long reads and help me not (to) have to read it.”

It’s interesting to note that Sreenivasan’s argument is the opposite of the theory Clay Shirky espoused in his landmark 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody.” According to Shirky, with the Internet and social media, everyone is able to publish and market their content at anytime and on any screen. Shirky identifies the old rule of publishing as “filter then publish,” and the new practice is “publish, then filter.”

Sreenivasan believes that people are increasingly unwilling to do the filtering. There is so much news and so many updates, and much of it ends up not being worth the time. A new rule of journalism, Sreenivasan says, is show your work – take the time to verify and confirm the facts, interpret it and make it relevant. Show them how you’ve done the job for them, and added value to the report.

According to Sreenivasan, “We don’t think enough about how we consume the media. We need to be informed about the ingredients,” noting that this is yet another case for slow news and that the “slow news movement” is growing.

Going even further, Sreenivasan says, “There is a large and growing population of smart people who are fed up with what is presented as news today. Commercial networks disenfranchise the audiences the advertisers want to reach.”

Sreenivasan mentions NPR journalist Andy Carvin as the epitome of a crowdsourcing Twitter journalist. Carvin´s Twitter feed is literally a sea of hashtags asking for confirmation of news, independent sources of news, verification of events and so on. For some, this is obviously a worthwhile project, but for Sreenivasan, the constant stream of news items pending verification and interpretation is leading to frustration.

In Sreenivasan’s opinion, Tweets that contain links to useful content rule, while tweets that just lead to chatter make users frustrated. “If I read a blog that isn’t worth anything, I feel like you wasted my time,” Sreenivasan said, noting that wasting time – even if it is only 45 seconds – is almost the biggest no-no of the new media world.

With so many sources, so many channels and so much information out there, people have come to expect that what you lead them to, will be worth their time. That is particularly true for professional journalists, who are there to interpret the news landscape and help people make sense of the information. That is also one of the most valuable assets journalists have over citizen reporters, Sreenivasan argues.

According to Sreenivasan,“You can always make more money, but you can’t earn more time.” The new technology has made almost professional grade tools available to everyone and significantly lowered the barrier of entry for anyone to publish their content. In theory, this makes everyone a reporter, everyone a journalist and everyone a publisher. “But that doesn’t mean that all submitted content adds to the news story,” Sreenivasan says.

“News should be of value to you,” he explains, noting that some networks are already experimenting with letting users submit their stories right from their iPad screens for without pay. But Sreenivasan cautions people to stop and think about their actions for a second. “Facebook and Twitter makes it so easy for us to share and upload, but the cost is that you lose the ownership of that intellectual property once it lives on their servers,” he said.

Harkening back to a sentiment that long defined the news industry, Sreenivasan concludes, “The value of the work we do is the basis for journalism.”

Related Posts

• May 2, 2009 -- Twitter & Skype classroom coverage of Paul Gillin (4)
• February 7, 2009 -- MCDM group on Yammer. Reasons for failure (3)
• February 2, 2009 -- Videos of UW Insight: The Digital President event (0)
• November 9, 2008 -- Amazondeals on Twitter (2)
• October 12, 2008 -- Bye tweme, here comes GroupTweet! (5)

Turns out, quite a bit.

Occupy Seattle Photos (c) Eric Becker / We Are Shouting

Until recently, the effective strength and success of protest movements was ultimately determined not in the streets, but in editorial meetings. Newspapers and broadcasters would decide how much play to give the protesters, who would wait with bated breath for the 5 o’clock news or the next morning’s edition to see how much anyone else would hear about their cause. Sometimes they got plenty of attention, like when the WTO came to Seattle in 1999. But this system awarded aggressive behavior from protesters and police, taking notice proportional to property destruction and tear gas, while massive marches like the ones on the eve of the Iraq invasion were effectively ignored if they were peaceful.

But the game has changed.

Newspapers don’t dictate what’s news now. With the rise of Twitter, and the bloggosphere, the diversity of other voices online tell them what’s news.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been a testament to this new kind of protest coverage (as perhaps the Tea Party movement was before it). The protests were initially written off, ignored and marginalized for several weeks. But the outpouring of support in Facebook and Twitter streams, and the challenges from upstart outlets to the mainstream media coverage or lack thereof  coupled with the tenacity of protesters, finally caught mainstream attention.

Last Thursday, the momentum shifted. The New York Times put #OWS on the cover, and with Amanda Knox shuttered in her home, the cable news channels switched protest coverage into overdrive. Once the dominoes started to fall, politicians started feeling the pressure to weigh in, creating yet more news.

While the proliferation of alternative media outlets certainly deserves credit here, another big change from the past is the diversity of voices coming from within mainstream media itself.

I first heard about the #OWS protests in their first week from the twitter feed of New York Times Assistant Managing Editor Jim Roberts. He might not have thought the protests we’re worthy of print at the time, but clearly they were interesting enough for a few tweets.

On September 30^th, he tweeted that Occupy Wall Street was the most searched term on the Times’ website. Five or Ten years ago, the paper would have barely been able to measure what was a clear message to engage with more coverage.

For now, OWS coverage continues full clip, and protests are springing up in hundreds of cities around the country. In a bygone media era, would the same movement have just fizzled out?

Related Posts

• May 2, 2011 -- Bin Laden’s Nail in the Coffin: Goodbye Paperboy, Hello Apps (3)
• January 12, 2011 -- Mobile News Apps – Ross Reynolds (4)
• November 2, 2010 -- In the ‘Post-Digital World,’ Newspapers are Actually Hip (14)
• January 18, 2010 -- The New York Times may charge for content (2)
• June 15, 2009 -- #iranelection (9)

Just a few days ago, Seattle non-profit Reel Grrls released a video thanking supporters for stepping up and donating to the local youth media production house during their current dust-up with former sponsor, Comcast. Ever since the firestorm broke out two weeks ago in which Comcast threatened to yank $18,000 in summer funding from the tiny non-profit, Reel Grrls has since raised over $23,000 in private donations after the story garnered nationwide attention including write-ups in the Washington Post.

It’s clearly being perceived as media justice victory for the ages, as a local group focused on teaching media literacy to youth dukes it out with a media giant and gets the upper hand. For those that weren’t following the story, on May 12, Lila Kitaeff, technical director at Reel Grrls, sent out a tweet criticizing Comcast’s hiring of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker.

“OMG! @FCC Commissioner Baker voted 2 approve Comcast/NBC merger & is now lving FCC for A JOB AT COMCAST?!?”

The tweet in question was by no means offensive — just about everybody was criticizing the hiring move — but it apparently irked those at Comcast. The rest of the story has been thoroughly covered as Steve Kipp, a Comcast spokesman threatened to ax Reel Grrls funding, and once it became a national story, Comcast backtracked and pledged to support Reel Grrls after all. Mallory Graham, executive director at Reel Grrls decided they’d be better off severing ties with Comcast and searching for other funding options. It was a bold move, but they’ve now exceeded the amount of money they turned down from Comcast by a whopping $5,000. Several phone calls to Steve Kipp and other Comcast representatives for comment went unreturned.

Some people have questioned if Reel Girls should have kept the Comcast money, accepted their apology, and essentially continued doing good things with corporate money. They still would have notched a media justice victory and maintained a sponsor with a steady stream of cash. Despite the national media storm which clearly made things worse, even Kitaeff admits that up until recently, Comcast actually wasn’t a bad partner.

“We did have a really positive relationship being funded by Comcast for the last three years. The issue for us came when we felt like we weren’t able to express our own values and they decided to take punitive measures against us.”

Two of the actual reel grrls who appear in the 41 second YouTube video which went out May 19th and subsequently caught the attention of the national media seem to feel the same way when they recently chatted with Flip The Media about their feelings on the dust-up in general.

“They had been a good partner for us in the past, they really had,” says 18-year-old volunteer Julia Levy. “This kind of stuff hadn’t happened before. They’d come to our screenings at the end of the summer program. They’d gotten us in touch with other organizations as well and made sure we were connected. Sometimes I sort of rolled my eyes that we had a corporate sponsor but we’re a small nonprofit. We take what we get in order to run our programs.”

Levy laughed as she admitted that this experience has taught her a lot about the darker side of corporate media. She said she still doesn’t understand how things shifted so fast. “It’s shocking, after all that goodwill and good faith they showed us, that they turned nasty. It didn’t seem like the people we knew from Comcast.”

Naomi Nelson, 20, of Seattle who also volunteers with Reel Grrls echoed Levy’s point.

“That actually made it an easy way to break up. It’s one of those relationships that isn’t the best and you don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. It was an easy scape goat. I’m not disappointed they’re not a part of our lives anymore. I am thankful of the money they gave us.”

Both girls will be attending Reel Grrls’ summer apprenticeship program which runs from July 5 – August 18. In a related note, Kitaeff says now that the staff and volunteers of Reel Grrls have experienced what amounted to a corporate bullying job over a tweet, they’ve decided shift this year’s summer program focus to studying issues related to free speech.

Related Posts

• May 2, 2011 -- Bin Laden’s Nail in the Coffin: Goodbye Paperboy, Hello Apps (3)
• January 19, 2011 -- In information warfare, events are effective weapons (2)
• February 13, 2010 -- Is this the future of “Free?” (12)
• December 9, 2009 -- Media. Power. Panic. Monopoly. (5)
• April 28, 2008 -- Fear of a Social Planet (1)