Applications now available for a Three-Day Session, October 21-23, in New York
By Al Giordano
The Narco News School of Authentic Journalism and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict today announce 24 scholarships for our October 21-23 workshop on Organizing Journalism & Civil Resistance. The session is open to independent journalists and media makers (print, online and video) who report on social movements and seek to be better at it.
Applications can be received via email by writing to NYWorkshop2011@narconews.com and are due by 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 21, 2011.
This workshop offers training in the use of video and written and online media to help journalists and media makers report more effectively on social movements, civil resistance, nonviolent campaigns and community organizing so that the messages of those movements can cut through the clouds of mass media confusion. There are many common errors and presumptions through which even sympathetic media makers too often harm such movements. This workshop is also to test some new curriculum for the 2012 School of Authentic Journalism that seeks to inoculate against such media missteps, as well as to share vital reporting skills and increase participants’ knowledge of the strategic and tactical dynamics of social movements.
The event is free to accepted applicants: No tuition will be charged. In addition to training on reporting and writing news stories and making online video and media “go viral,” we’ve assembled an experienced team of organizers, authentic journalists and change makers to seek to answer this question:
From the Arab Spring to Mexico’s unprecedented nonviolent movement to end the drug war that surfaced in 2011, civil resistance is succeeding in countries with extreme state repression and poverty moreso than it is in North America. Why is that? And what can be done to bring the renaissances of civil resistance and authentic journalism to North America, where theoretically there are more freedoms, tools and resources available to aspiring change agents?
In North America, there is so much “activism,” so much “blogging,” so many “protests” and “marches,” and yet our friends in other lands are winning historic battles while few North American movements are making any progress at all.
We believe that the media – not just the big commercial and state-owned media that the public already mistrusts, but also too many in the “blogosphere,” “social media,” and sympathetic “alternative” media that do not understand the strategic dynamics of how movements win and lose – has a lot to do with why so many North American movements fail to achieve the change they seek. “The problem of media” is now the problem of everyone that wants to defend or change our communities and our world. Some of the challenges are easily solved by learning and understanding the common mistakes that well-meaning media-makers and journalists make in reporting movements, and through improvement of our technical skills. Other questions remain unanswered, so we will consult, together, with some unparalleled minds and hands that have won and lost political battles already and learned plenty from the experience. More than just a training session, this workshop will serve as a kind of three-day “think tank” to seek to break further ground in untying the knot with which media inhibits the realization of authentic democracy.
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