FROM THE BARRICADES FOR 6/13/09

Posted by Jon Pike Jun 13, 2009

Well, it’s back to the blog for this week. Moving 1,500 miles and planning a wedding can put paid to a lot of blogging. I’m also trying to firm up my regular employment plans a bit and that is also putting a bit of a crimp in the blogging.

Writing a current affairs based column is quite a challenge. One has to regularly rely on other sources to drive the column and to ferret out ideas worth writing about.

One of the best sources for writing about the world of activism would have to be the alternative media website, Alternet. Alternet was a pioneer in the non-profit news world. This is a world I’ll have to do a whole song and dance about sometime. Alternet culls some of the best news from the world of activism and generates its own content as well. I really do not my weekly activism column without it.

I really would like to get back to using one of the first open-content, collective news sites, Indymedia, and probably will some day. Indymedia was born during the “battle of Seattle” and at about ten years old, it is one of the longest running radical sources of news of all time. The only one that I think lasted longer, was the old Guardian newspaper, which unceremoniously folded in the late 1980s.

Radical and alternative media has been an obsession of mine for a long time, and I’m happy to bring a little of the radical world to this corner of suite101.

I’m kind of deciding these days how much of a full-time academic I want to be, and how much of a full-time alternative journalist I want to be. By the way, I make no bones about getting a lot of my material from the above sources because I figure, not every reader of suite101 is aware of them. I like to think I’m bringing a little of this world to the pages of suite101. Whatever happens, I will probably keep my suite101 column for as long as it exists. It helps keep the discipline I need to enforce myself as a writer. That is probably the greatest value to sites like this. It helps keep writers focused on regularly producing because of the contract we have with suite101. It also doesn’t hurt that we get paid for what we do. It helps put a little money aside.