Media from Below: The Making of the Video

By Al Giordano

One of the reasons we use a horizontal learning model for the School of Authentic Journalism is that frequently we professors become the students and the scholars end up teaching vital skills and lessons, including sometimes by leading plenary sessions. At February’s j-school I asked Milena Velis to do that as she’s part of an organization in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that I view as having developed a model for authentic journalism that can and ought to be replicated everywhere: The Media Mobilizing Project.

Milena Velis and Rev. Jim Lawson at the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism. DR 2010 Kara Newhouse.

Two years ago this month, a then recently-formed MMP invited me to Philly to conduct a workshop on how Narco News was developed, share the lessons we have learned from it, and the underlying philosophical and organizing principles behind the work we do. There, I was met by a diverse group of about 60 people: union leaders, members of neighborhood, civil rights, student and immigrant groups, and community organizers of many stripes. Frustrated that the commercial media either distorted or ignored community organizing efforts in their city, they had come together with the goal of helping each other create their own media from below. They had a lot of ideas of their own and peppered me with smart questions for almost three hours. Then they took me out to a karaoke bar, plied me with beer, made me sing, and asked still more questions. They do know how to organize!

As the video you are about to see demonstrates, two years later, the Media Mobilizing Project has changed the history of political organizing in its city. From organizing Walmart workers to supporting striking taxi drivers and neighbors opposed to casino construction, they’ve stepped onto the terrain that the commercial media had abandoned: giving voice and image and communications skills and tools to these movements. They’ve trained hundreds of organizers to use cameras, microphones and the Internet for communication, and now host three radio shows – one by students, one by labor organizers and another in the Spanish language – and are developing a television show at present. The website and other media they’ve created has also broken ground in improving communications systems within the struggles, and between different movements working on different causes.

This is not the case of an "NGO" or an outside group of "professionals" coming in to teach the organizers, but, rather, one of organizers and media makers teaching each other, on a similar horizontal learning system that we deploy at the School of Authentic Journalism. It is a bona fide homegrown movement.

The Media Mobilizing Project accomplished all that without a big money chest or asking permission from any authority. They just got together and organized each other to do it themselves. As you watch this video, think about how its model could be applied to your community, and about who else in your own circles you’ll want to show it that might be interested in launching a similar grassroots project:

School of Authentic Journalism scholar Ter Garcia of the class of 2010, who has remained in Mexico from her native Spain since the school completed in mid-February, produced this video, and shares with us some of the techniques she did to do it:

This video is based on the plenary session given by Milena Velis and videotaped by the Viral Video Team at the School of Authentic Journalism, together with images that enrich and illustrate the narration.

The Media Mobilizing Project is an organization that uses communications media as a weapon in struggle. So when it came time to produce this video, the videos already produced by MMP, available on its website and on Youtube, were thus very helpful to complete this video. In the case of the history of the Media Mobilizing Project and the influence it took from the Zapatista movement and that of Martin Luther King, I searched for images at Archive.org since that is a database of documents that utilize a Creative Commons license. In the same way, the soundtrack for the video was found in another free license music database known as Jamendo. Screenshots from the Media Mobilizing Project’s blog were captured with Screenium software (one can download a test program of the software that allows one to capture up to 30 seconds of an image. To best render the screen shots while using Final Cut Pro software, first I saved them as Quicktime films, since the still image captured by Screenium can otherwise present problems with Final Cut Pro, but using Quicktime can be exported at the size of 720x480, and that way the image has better quality for the video.

It should be noted that Ter’s background, prior to attending the School, was as a daily newspaper reporter, not a video producer or editor. At the School, she was part of the Documentary Filmmaking work group. Prior to the school she had not used Final Cut Pro software, or any of the others she lists, above, to produce this video. Some weeks later, you’ve just watched a newsreel that she produced from cradle to grave.

Ter Garcia (fourth from left) with the Documentary Filmmaking work group at the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism. DR 2010 Jill Freidberg.

That’s very much the philosophy of the both Media Mobilizing Project and the School of Authentic Journalism: One doesn’t need to attend four years or two years of or even one semester of expensive journalism or cinema schools to learn to do this work and do it well. Experience is gained by doing it, and once experience is gained, we have a responsibility to pass it on to others and multiply these skills, to democratize them.

As it becomes increasingly evident that the commercial media doesn’t serve democracy at the grassroots level, it is correspondingly urgent to construct media from within the ranks of those who organize, a media from below. Through the Media Mobilizing Project, as you’ve just seen, taxi drivers and Walmart clerks and community organizers have now become video producers, radio hosts, investigative reporters and Internet journalists. And it has mobilized so many people, from social sectors that previously did not communicate or organize much with each other, to do this in just two years.

This is the future that ten years ago we dreamed about at Narco News. And that future is happening now.

I'll add that on Wednesday evening, April 14, at 7:30 p.m., we'll be talking more about Authentic Journalism as Civil Resistance in New York City at the Brecht Forum at 451 West Street. Some of the graduates of the School of Authentic Journalism will be present to participate in the conversation. For those of you close by, we hope to see you there. And if you can't afford the sliding scale ($6, $10, or $15) ticket, send me an email at narconews@gmail.com telling us why you'd like to attend: we have a few scholarships to give out, especially for those who want to do this kind of work, or be better, faster and more coherent at it. And, as always, we'll be scouting for scholars for the next School of Authentic Journalism there, as well.