[imc-melbourne-work] Melbourne IMC decides to suspend open publishing

[takver]

Statement featured on Front Page of Melbourne IMC:
Open publishing has been suspended on Melbourne Indymedia as numbers in
our editorial collective are insufficient to manage the site effectively
and responsibly. We realise that MIM has played a vital role in
reporting activist news from Melbourne, around Australia and
internationally. To this end the present collective will be assessing
options for how best to provide an activist news service in the future.
If you wish to get involved, please contact us, or subscribe to our
mailing list.

While open publishing is suspended, our collective suggests if you have
a well researched, well-written story about Melbourne events, you should
post the story to Sydney Indymedia. We thank our many loyal readers and
contributors for several years of grassroots journalism and media
activism and hope we can resume reporting with an even better interface
at some stage in the future. 
Melbourne Indymedia Collective
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/index.php
++++++++++++

A linked article gives some reasons:

Basically, irate users and spammers have become more persistent in their
attacks and without a software upgrade or a collective of several people
to actively moderate posts and do features, the site is unworkable. If
numbers are insufficient to moderate the site effectively, then the
only responsible action is to stop open publishing.

I think this is the responsible thing to do for our loyal readers and
contributors, many of whom have openly complained about spam and
crossposts being published and unmoderated.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2007/06/146534.php


As an editor of 4 years standing here are some personal comments:

One of the factors leading to our current situation was the debilitating
conflict with ML in Darwin during 2006/2007 and the perceived lack of
organisational solidarity displayed by the network resulting in active
members of the Melbourne collective drifting away from Melbourne
Indymedia into other projects. We haven't been able to generate more
interest or more involvement in the admin/site editing/ feature writing
of the site since.

The weekly radio program on community radio was well organised this year
with more people involved, but no one understood that basic site admin
and editorial has fallen really to a couple of people for quite a long
period of time. In terms of reporting there is really only 2 or 3 ppl
(of whom I include myself) who actively report to the newswire on
activist events and demos in Melbourne.

The actual trigger for the decision to suspend publishing was an irate
regular contributor from Sydney (Parrot Press) who spammed the local
newswire with over 200 posts in 4 days, after other contributors and an
editor criticised him for overwhelming the site with his posts and
crossposting irrelevant comments. Attempts were made to de-escalate the
situation which proved fruitless. IP logging was temporarily turned on
in an attempt to block the user, but the user was using proxies, so
could not be effectively blocked from spamming the wire or threads. So
our collective reluctantly decided we no longer had the time or energy
to moderate and should close down open publishing.

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of blogging, and
particularly moderated group blogs that have drawn people away,
particularly when there is the constant verbal harassment in Indymedia
comment threads. Leftwrites (www.leftwrites.net) is one prominent blog
primarily based in Melbourne that analyses the news from a broadly
leftist perspective (left social democrat to anarchist) that has
attracted some of our readers (and criticism from others). The rise of
blogging gives everyone with access to the internet a voice, but it is
not the same as producing a news site, which Indymedia at its very basis
is about: grassroots and activist news.

Spam control has been an ongoing battle of which Melbourne managed to
stay mostly ahead, but it has been a constant drain on time and energy,
requiring tweaking the software and manual moderation. To stay ahead of
the game at this stage we really needed a software upgrade. A
development site using drupal had been 80% completed. If this new site
had been completed and put into production our decision to suspend open
publishing may not have been necessary.

Melbourne does need an activist news site, and open publishing should be
part of that, but I have come to the conclusion that more editorial
control needs to be asserted to increase the standard of articles on the
principal newswire. Open publishing should be used to generate new
contributors and news postings, but should not be allowed to dominate
the site editorially as it has with the newswires and present software
(sf-active) used in Melbourne. Indybay has made sf-active work, although
I know there is a lot of moderation going on in the background to make
it effective.

We need to empower article contributors by letting them decide if they
want all comments, be able to approve comments, or choose no comments.
Remember if a poster chooses no comments in a well written article,
balance can be achieved by promoting a well written critical article in
response. Too often I have seen contributors being turned away from
Indymedia by the extent of abusive or destructive comments, because we
provided no option to turn off comments, and we have not had the time or
energy to moderate effectively.

I also want to reward consistent contributors of good articles by their
articles being promoted without moderation. That is where userids should
come in. A contributor should be able to build a profile and can then be
allowed priviledged posting access. 

One of the carrots we should be offering our contributors is that
promoted articles will be indexed by Google News. So that reports by
grassroots activists can be accessed alongside corporate media reports.
My greatest pleasure last year was seeing a woman involved in an
industrial dispute, not previously an Indy reader, from one of those
union solidarity pickets that go for several weeks in the suburbs, begin
to post to MIM, and their posts were featured in the centre column and
picked up by Google News to counterbalance reports in the mainstream
papers of The Age and Herald Sun. Similarly with Tasmanian forest
protests in which forest activists were able to counterbalance the PR of
the timber companies thru indy articles. We became highly useful in
'getting the news out' not just to our Indymedia scene but to a much
wider audience. It was very empowering to those contributors and to us
as media activists.

The real test is can we bounce back and provide something better than we
had today that allows us to concentrate on grassroots and activist news.
I hope so. The next several weeks we will find out whether the Melbourne
collective can regroup and continue a presence with a dedicated site.

There is also a new idea being put forward of an Australian continental
IMC. A few people across Australian IMCs have started  discussing this
possibility along the lines of us.indymedia, uk.indymedia, or even
aotearoa IMC. We might see where that takes us as well.

in solidarity
Takver
one of Melbourne IMC