Feature Archives

Within weeks of forming a union, employees of Bay Area News Group were shocked at the seemingly retaliatory firings of at least 20 journalists who had worked to form the East Bay bargaining unit. Last week, the Northern California Media Workers Guild filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. The 230-member Bay Area News Group East Bay bargaining unit includes the Oakland Tribune and other East Bay papers, as well as the San Mateo County Times on the peninsula.

A federal court earlier this month ordered Google's YouTube to hand over usernames, IP addresses, and viewing histories to Viacom sparking a controversy over Internet privacy. This week Viacom and the other litigants backed off their demand for YouTube user viewing histories and an agreement was reached with Google to anonymize the data. While some YouTube users say Viacom is now "off the hook" for intruding on people's online privacy, others question why Google was allowed to amass and use all this private data in the first place.

Post-Katrina reconstruction is still in progress throughout the Gulf Coast, with much of the City of New Orleans still in ruins. Dos Americas: The Reconstruction of New Orleans is a documentary focused on those rebuilding the city through interviews with some of the estimated 100,000 Latino migrant laborers who have converged in the area over the past two and a half years. Despite terrible working conditions, massive fraud, a housing crisis, severe harassment by law enforcement, and very limited resources, New Orleans’ Latino community has mushroomed since the storm and is establishing an infrastructure proportional to its size.

On Sunday July 20th, Indybay will have an orientation in Oakland for those interested in learning about the site and getting involved in media production and editorial work. The meeting will be at 3pm at 570 14th St Suite #3.

The indynewswire show airs weekly on Freak Radio, Friday mornings 10-12 noon, broadcasting news and opinion from independent media worldwide, focused on indymedia sites but also drawing from other websites. This week features audio from KBOO, Radio4All, Puerto Rico Indymedia and Portland Indymedia. Topics include the attack against the tree-sit protesting contruction of the I-69 NAFTA superhighway, farmworker Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez who died in the fields last month while picking 'two buck chuck,' police brutality in Portland, political property destruction, sentencing in greenscare cases, the campaign to free Chip Fitzgerald and much more.

Indymedia Newsreal, a monthly television series, brings progressive grassroots organizing, going on in your backyard, to a national television audience. Newsreal is a longstanding collaboration between the Independent Media Center and Free Speech TV. It is shown on Free Speech TV every first Thursday at 5pm PST and sent on disc to community screening groups who show it during public screenings or include it on public access shows.

Skidmark Bob of Free Radio Santa Cruz interviewed media analyst John Anderson about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to be discussed at the G8 summit in Japan and H.R. 4279, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act of 2007. Although ACTA's title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with tools targeting "Internet distribution and information technology." The PRO IP Act proposes to make substantial changes to federal copyright law, including the appointment of a copyright Czar.