[New-imc] SDIMC at last!

[Proletarian Productions]

Hi all!

I think that at long last, we're ready and have all of our stuff together 
to become an official IMC.

I've attached our Mission Statement, and our discussion and conclusions on 
the PoU, directly below find our letter of introduction.

Below the intro letter find our current contact info.

Jim Carter

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Introduction Letter,

WHO WE ARE: The San Diego Independent Media Center (SD-IMC).

HOW WE STARTED: The San Diego IMC started in early 2001 as a project of
a network of video students at the University of California at San Diego
(UCSD). We quickly organized and recruited beyond that base to encompass
independent publishers and videographers in the San Diego area.

WHAT WE'VE COVERED: Our first major project was intensive video coverage
of the demonstrations at the San Diego/Tijuana border in April 2001 as
part of the nationwide effort to coordinate actions with the major
demonstrations in Quebec City, Canada against the proposed Free Trade
Area of the Americas.

We were also heavily involved in covering the Biojustice/Beyond
Biodevastation events in June 2001, including the protests against the
Biotechnology Industry Organization's convention in San Diego, the
teach-ins and rally presenting Biojustice's point of view on
biotechnology and genetic engineering, and the intense police presence
on the streets of San Diego during the convention. We were able to
document the ways in which San Diego essentially turned its police
department into a security force for the biotechnology industry, and
were invited to make and present a 10-minute video to a local community
organization, the San Diego Action Network, as part of a discussion they
had on whether the police and city had gone too far to suppress the
protests and intimidate potential demonstrators from participating at all.

We've also covered local controversies about globalization and corporate
attacks on independent businesses, including the protests against
locating a Starbucks Coffee outlet in San Diego's historically Bohemian
Ocean Beach area. And, of course, since September 11 we've been involved
in covering the three events held so far in San Diego to resist the use
of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. as an excuse
for bombing and killing innocent civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Among our posts to the IMC newswire have been local stories on the
redistricting of the San Diego City Council, the ongoing controversy on
whether the city should continue giving away 18.5 acres of parkland to
the Boy Scouts of America despite their discriminatory policies against
Gays and atheists, the attempts to secure the rights of chronically ill
patients to access medical marijuana under California's Proposition 215
despite the opposition of local law enforcement, and the legal issues
faced by sexual minorities in terms of when, where and how they can
engage in sexual expression without fear of arrest.

WHY WE'RE HERE: The overall mission of the IMC's international network
is to challenge the mainstream corporate media and provide an outlet for
alternative journalism by ordinary people. Such a mission is
particularly important in San Diego, in which the major daily newspaper,
the San Diego Union-Tribune, is blatantly biased in favor of the city's
tight-knit power elite and is a low-quality publication even by the
normal standards of corporate newspapers. In some other cities,
progressive or semi-progressive voices do occasionally appear in the
corporate media; in San Diego this hardly ever happens. Even the major
alternative weekly, the San Diego Reader  despite occasionally
excellent muckraking coverage of the local elite  is owned by a
socially conservative publisher and reflects his personal anti-choice
and anti-Gay politics.

Genuinely progressive alternative journalism in San Diego is limited to
a handful of tiny, financially shaky publications. We hope that we, as a
fully functioning IMC, will be able to support the people already doing
progressive journalism in San Diego and expand their access to readers
and viewers through an IMC Web site based on the opening-publishing
principle. We also aim to help develop more progressive journalists in
San Diego and create a resource center to help them get material in
print or on video, and then enable them to present it to the public via
the Web.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Proposed IMC Name: sandiego.indymedia.org  San Diego IMC
Contact Name: Jim Carter
Email: prolprod at home.com

City: San Diego
State: CA
Country: USA

Tech Contact Name: Guy Berliner
Tech Contact Email: guy at subrosa.org

  Guy is going to be out of town for the next week or so, so please CC Jim 
on any tech issues for the next little while, so that I can try and move on 
anything that needs to be done.
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