How IndyMedia paved the way for the future of crowdsourced journalism
Jay Rosen interviews Christopher Anderson of the New York City Indypendent
Christopher Anderson fits the category of participant-observer. He's worked as an organizer, reporter, and editor for the New York City Independent Media Center and the New York City Indypendent since 2001. He is currently completing his PhD at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he studies journalistic authority, media history, and new media technologies. His dissertation will be on citizen journalism in an era of technological change, and it will include the story of IndyMedia. In an earlier life, Anderson was a regional director with ACORN Housing Corporation, a non-profit community organizing group working to assist low-income first time home buyers.
Assignment Zero executive editor Jay Rosen interviewed him as a good source on the rise of the IndyMedia movement, and the Independent Media Center (IMC) that sprung up after 1999, when protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle shocked everyone in Big Media, while at the Indy sites "...thousands of posts about the WTO protests, and the sum total of coverage ran rings around what the mainstream media had been trying to do."
Anderson says it was the original act of crowdsourcing, "in a way."
Jay Rosen: How did you come to be such a close student of IndyMedia?
Christopher Anderson: Well, I was actually involved with Indymedia in New York before I went back to grad school. In fact, you could say that my involvement with Indymedia (and I still help them out a bit) helped send me back to school, rather than the other way around. I started helping out with the IMC shortly after the September 11 attacks in NYC. I thought that it sorta looked like the world was going to hell and figured I'd better do something fast.
