[New-imc] pittsburgh imc intro letter!

[Andy Mulkerin]

The following is the Pittsburgh IMC's introductory letter. We're all ready
to go through the approval process, as you will read. Note that our
concerns with the principles of unity and membership criteria are only
suggestions, to be aired out, and we don't plan on holding out until
they're adopted or anything. Just things we've discussed that we'd like to
make a note of.

Thanks

Andy


Pittsburgh is a two-newspaper town. But that doesn't make it any easier to
make your dissenting voice heard. It just makes it twice as hard.

In a town with a history that's kneedeep in robber barons and machine
politics it's not hard to see that the press is less than free. In recent
years the more "liberal" of the two daily newspapers, the Post-Gazette,
has endorsed drastic downtown redevelopment, taxpayer-funded stadiums and
huge hospital mergers*, all at the expense of everyday citizens. There is
an evident need for more community-based coverage, both with regard to
radical politics and with regard to the issues that affect everyday life
here.

In addition to attempting to close this gap in independent and critical
media outlets, the Pittsburgh Independent Media Center is dedicated to
empowering each and every citizen of the city and its metropolitan area to
take the task of making media into their own hands. The job of reporting
is too important to be left to professional reporters with corporate
bosses and vested interests.

The Pittsburgh IMC collective has agreed to the IMC principles of unity in
their current form, with these exceptions/suggestions:

#3: We advocate a change in the wording of this, to something like: All
IMC's recognize the importance of respect for privacy and make an effort,
within reason, to avoid filming or photographing activists who ask that we
do so.

We would also favor seeing the addition of:
All IMC's will avoid using advertising as a source of revenue.

We also have concensed to the IMC Membership Criteria. We noted that in
criterion (j) it's mentioned that each IMC should have a liason to the
global network, but it doesn't enumerate precisely what that liason's
duties are. We'd like to know more precisely what that means.

- Pittsburgh Indymedia Collective
  http://www.indypgh.org

Mission Statement:

The Pittsburgh Independent Media Center is a voluntary collective
dedicated to serving the local community with a system for disseminating
print and online news. Our coverage will be the issues and events ignored
by mainstream media, and also those issues that mainstream media covers
with the inherent bias of a news organization run as a business. We
believe that the job of disseminating information does not belong to a
privileged class of reporters and editors, but to everyone. It is our duty
as citizens to act as journalists so that the public knows the truth in
every instance, not just when the truth is to our political and economic
rulers' advantage. We seek to be an inclusive organization which will grow
as a community, and not as a hierarchy.


*See editorials, 02/07/00, 07/0998, 05/13/02 and 06/30/02.