Published Date 11/8/10 1:11 PM
Nurture basic journalism and storytelling skills in alt-media to create outreach media that people actually want to engage with. (Link – currently offline, sadly.)
Linking is key. Link to alternative resources wherever you can. The simplest and most effective way to compete with corporate news is by building a dense web of interconnected, linked alternative news sources.
Aggregation is how decentralisation works in practice. Without aggregation, decentralisation fragments and disappears.
Start local. The primary input for any alt-media project should be at the local level. From there, content should flow upward into subject-based and geographic aggregation sites – always with a clear, valid link back to the original source.
This is hard, but try to avoid top-down publishing models built on consensus and bureaucracy. Where possible, let the network do the work.
“Content is just something for conversation.” This raises an open question: where does the interaction around content actually take place? This remains unresolved and needs both more thought and more technical work. For now, a diversity of approaches is probably healthiest – while always preserving the link back to the original source.
A controversial point: use corporate social media only for link-building and directing people toward contemporary, independent media projects. Avoid using corporate platforms as primary spaces of distribution or community. Do use them – and abuse them – but don’t build real communities or organisations inside them. That’s a common and costly mistake.
The simple workflow is: publish on an alt-news site or blog, then share links on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Tools exist to automate this.
Be open to using all tools, but lean toward free/open-source software and open standards (#4opens) wherever possible, for two reasons:
Open systems allow others to build things with your project that you never imagined. This is where almost all meaningful innovation on the web actually comes from.
Corporate tools are structurally driven to prioritise profit over users, content, and functionality. Even the “good” ones eventually sell out, or collapse when funding runs out, and all the work you’ve built on them can vanish overnight.
RSS and Creative Commons are your friends. Use them well in every project you create.
That’s really it. Let’s work together to use the “digital hole” undermining corporate media, and replace it with something better. It’s genuinely not that difficult.
Let’s link. Let’s aggregate. Let’s build on open standards.
Hamish Campbell
(typed while camping in a forest by the beach, Bay of Biscay)
