Aid & Abet

Congrats to Students for a Free Tibet on a beautiful action this morning. Yes, that IS the Golden Gate Bridge. Read more of my thoughts here. See you Wednesday?

Today I was featured on the radio program Against the Grain on KPFA, talking about my pamphlet, “Becoming the Media.” You can hear the interview here.

I am very grateful for the experience, and think I need to not say “um” so much! Would love your feedback on the interview.

Jessica Hoffmann is awesome. Oh, and  Donna called me naive about racism in the media. 

Last weekend I attended the 5th Women, Action, and the Media conference in Boston, sponsored by the Center for New Words. I had a great time! I’ve been to the conference a couple of years in a row, so I’m starting to get to know a bunch of people, and it’s a great place to see old friends, like Debbie Rasmussen from Bitch Magazine who moved from Oakland to Portland last year, or former Clamor editor Jessica Hoffmann, who lives in LA and works on make/shift magazine, or DeAnne Cuellar from San Antonio’s Texas Media Empowerment Project. Just really great to be around super inspiring women doing all sorts of great projects.

This year I presented a workshop with Nell Greenberg of RAN on publicizing your book or project if you have little or no money. A lot of what I do through Aid & Abet is not rocket science - you can really do it yourself if you have the time and motivation. The workshop went well and I’ll try to post the outline and resources here in case you couldn’t make it.

There were plenty of highlights from the weekend. The keynote address on Friday night was by Helen Thomas, introduced by Ann Friedman from The American Prospect as the queen of “not shutting up.” Helen Thomas has been a journalist since the ’40s (!!), has been a White House correspondent for 57 years (covering every administration since JFK) and is famous for challenging Bush on the invasion of Iraq when few others in the press corps would. She was great, and humorous, and I appreciated seeing her talk. Read the rest of this entry »

During the the week of actions starting March 15, there was a flurry of media around the questions: what’s next for the antiwar movement? where to from here? I went to a panel organized by the Heads Up collective, I produced a program for KPFA, and there were tons of newspaper articles and radio stories.

I’d like to give a shout-out to the War Resisters League, for prioritizing listening and learning from the movement. Organizer Matthew Smucker is working on a report that details finding from interviewing over 100 grassroots organizers around the country. You can get a preview of the findings from his new article in The Indypendent: “What is to be done? Assessing the Antiwar Movement” Big ups to WRL for thinking long term, past the next big anniversary or march or demo.