March 23, 2007
(Freelance journalist and anarchist Josh Wolf has refused to turn over videotapes of a protest being investigated by a federal grand jury. Online Journalism Review has written about his case; you can read more in Wikipedia. In December I promised to write about his case every Friday until he is freed. Spread the word. – Tom Abate aka MiniMediaGuy).
American Journalism Review has published a lovely portrait of Josh Wolf and his mother, Liz Wol Spada, who is described as “an elementary school teacher with cropped gray hair who speaks in the earnest, optimistic tones of someone who spends a lot of time with young children.”
The AJR article, written by Dana Hull, a San Jose Mercury News reporter, concludes with a phone interview (prison officials would not allow a face to face visit):
“I’ve become more resolved in a few key points,” says Wolf . . . ”I want to go to graduate school for journalism and get a better understanding of the history of journalism. And the issue of prison communication is very neglected within the entire justice system.” He’s embarked on a new project, PrisonBlogs.Net, which seeks to “provide prisoners with a voice, a public, and the sense of empowerment and the restored dignity this brings” by publishing their writing and art. Says Wolf: “I’ve got an exit plan.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Josh will receive the Newpaper Guild’s Herbert Block Freedom Award. It comes with a $5,000 prize. The Guild press release says:
“Wolf, a San Francisco freelance journalist . . . has been held in federal prison since August 2006 for refusing to turn over video he shot of a July 8, 2005, demonstration in San Francisco. Federal prosecutors looking into possible crimes committed during the protest called Wolf before a federal grand jury in February 2006. He was initially jailed in August, freed for a short period during an appeal and was returned to prison on Sept. 22, 2006, where he remains. His attorney has stated that the video Wolf shot does not depict the crimes being investigated, but does include interviews with some of the protestors who spoke on the condition that their identities would be protected. Wolf continues to appeal the ruling.”
* * *
Hope continues that new U.S. Attorney Steve Schools will take a fresh look at Wolf’s case. If you have not already done so, write him. Keep a level tone. It’s hard for people to focus on your words when you’re hurling verbal insults. Here are the addresses:
By snail mail: The Honorable Scott Schools, United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, 450 Golden Gate Avenue, 11th Floor, San Francisco, California 94102-3495
By email, send it to his assistant: natalya.labauve@usdoj.gov and she will refer it.
Originally posted by Tom Abate from MiniMediaGuy, remediated by yatta on Mar 23, 2007 at 11:10 AM
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drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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