Independent Media Center (IMC)

Also known as Indymedia, the Independent Media Center (IMC) ran a collective of media outlets dedicated to accurate, passionate, and radical news coverage. Originating in Australia, IMC slowly developed during the global justice protest Carnival Against Capital, and later came to wider prominence during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. There, IMC provided online grassroots coverage of the protests, serving as a clearinghouse of reports, photos, audio, and video footage for journalists. From these materials, the Seattle IMC produced five documentaries, distributed daily to public access stations through satellite uplink. Because of Indymedia’s democratic open-publishing system, media activists on every continent replicated this structure locally. As a result, by 2010 IMC grew to 175 active centers. However, by 2014, however, the network declined. Speculation on the reason for this decline includes informal hierarchies, security issues, lack of regional engagement, increase in social media use, and website underdevelopment.