Oklahoma Independent Media Center

The roots of the Indymedia movement

The original Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), was established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. The center acted as a clearinghouse of information for journalists, and provided up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio and video footage through its website. Using the collected footage, the Seattle Independent Media Center (seattle.indymedia.org) produced a series of five documentaries, uplinked every day to satellite and distributed throughout the United States to public access stations.

The center also produced its own newspaper, distributed throughout Seattle and to other cities via the internet, as well as hundreds of audio segments, transmitted through the web and Studio X, a 24-hour micro and internet radio station based in Seattle. The site, which uses a democratic open-publishing system, has since then logged more than 2 million hits, and was featured on America Online, Yahoo, CNN, BBC Online, and numerous other sites. Through a decentralized and autonomous network, hundreds of media activists have since setup independent media centres in London, Canada, Mexico City, Prague, Belgium, France, and Italy, with more to come.

For more information visit the global IMC site - www.indymedia.org

Oklahoma joins

Oklahoma students began meeting in 2000 with the goal of establishing an IMC to serve the state. The first web site was set up in 2003. The collective was accepted into the global IMC network in 2004.

Participants have changed over the years, showing more age diversity, with activity levels varying, but the web site remained, although it went through several transformations, and lost some content in the process. An Oscailt-powered site ran from 2004 until Spring of 2007, when the current version, using Drupal, was unveiled.