Liverpool Indymedia

Last year the Liverpool Indymedia website was set up to provide a platform for reports on the struggles that are taking place all around us, these reports cover a wide range of issues and social movements - from neighbourhood campaigns to grassroots mobilisations, from critical analysis to direct action.

Like its parent website, Indymedia UK, content is created through a system of open publishing: anyone can upload a written, audio or video report, or a picture directly to the site. Through this system of 'Direct Media', Indymedia erodes the dividing line between reporters and reported, between active producers and passive audience: people are enabled to speak for themselves.

Liverpool Indymedia is an open group consisting of political activists, media campaigners, radical journalists and dissident voices as well as individual contributors, IMC supporters and ordinary people. Independent DIY media projects are spreading around the planet at unprecedented speed. Triggered by discontent with the mainstream media and supported by the widespread availability of media technologies, groups all over the world are creating their own channels of information and distribution in order to bypass the (mainstream) corporate media. The idea behind most of these projects is to create open platforms to which everyone can contribute - not only a small media elite with their particular interests. By eliminating the classic division between professional producers and passive audience, many issues and discussions that were previously suppressed become visible and available.

The media ´platforms´ used are as diverse as the people involved. Independent publications are produced in most regions of the world. One prominent example here in the UK is the weekly news sheet Schnews. Meanwhile, community and pirate radio stations are re-conquering the airwaves, being the only means of distributing information in many parts of the world. Video has become a particularly DIY-friendly technology, with some groups, such as the Brazilian TV Viva, organising open screenings in public places, and others, such as the German AK Kraak, producing regular video news shows. In countries with public access TV, groups such as the New York collective Paper Tiger compile videos as a TV show and screen them via public access slots. Elsewhere, other groups are starting to screen videos over the Internet - watch out, for example, for Pirate TV which is produced by the video collective Undercurrents. The Internet has many more alternative news and info sites to offer, from the grassroots notice board a-infos (Alternative News service) to the slightly larger non-governmental-organization (NGO) focused Oneworld online.

Liverpool Indymedia: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/liverpool/