ABSTRACT
The activist media of the global online network of Independent Media Centres (Indymedia) presents challenges to ways of doing journalism (Atton, 2004). Research into Indymedia has tended to focus on three aspects of the network: the nature of its organization (Kidd, 2003; Pickard, 2006); its methods of journalism and its journalistic content (Atton, 2003; Jankowski and Jensen, 2003; Platon and Deuze, 2003); and its contribution to political activism in civil society (Downing, 2003; Pickard, 2006). The network’s practice of grassroots, eyewitness reporting by activists (rather than by professional journalists) enables a strategy of self-representation that offers “a different cast of voices” (Harcup, 2003, p. 360) from those that tend to populate mainstream journalism. Moreover, the use of open publishing software, coupled with avowedly non-hierarchical and collective methods of organization, enables (in principle at least) a large number of contributors to report on an equally large number of topics. Consequently, news reporting across the Indymedia network provides multiple accounts of stories viewed from multiple perspectives. The Indymedia network becomes a space for the implicit critique of more conventional practices of news gathering and presentation, emphasising as they do professional detachment (‘objectivity’), the pursuit of a single version of the ‘truth’ and the construction of that truth through a largely exclusive compact between the expert culture of journalism and the expert cultures of other professional groups as sources.
