media

Speak! Radical women of color media collective has just released their compilation of spoken word, poetry, and song! You can buy the CD online and proceeds will go to helping mothers and low-income activists attend the Allied Media Conference in Detroit!
Full press release (featuring guest-blogger Lisa Factora-Borchers!) after jump!

The Japanese video game Rapelay (which encourages players to rape women and then force abortions upon) that Amazon.com recently pulled from its online shelves has not only hit high on the barf-o-meter and broke the WTF Scale, but has elicited reactions from a variety of sources. Although I first read about the game on Feministing, the Curvature had a great in-depth feminist response, and girl-gamer Leigh Alexander from SexyVideoGameland had an intriguing two cents as well. (Google result/bad political-metaphor-maker Kevin McCullough not so much). Most interesting was the very much non-blogsphere event of the New York City Assault Alliance Against Sexual Violence calling a news conference yesterday morning specifically denouncing any US video distributors from carrying the game. Any New Yorkers hear about it or attend it? Anyone else want to weigh in on the various responses to the story?

The other night I saw this in a bar, and could not figure out what it was a commercial for (especially since I couldn’t hear the sound!) It seemed kinda fishy and it turned out it was: It’s from a 2007 PSA campaign put together by the Ad Council and the U.S. Department of Justice and National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to Prevent Online Sexual Exploitation (mouthful!) I know I’ve seen at least a couple more and they all leave a bad taste in my mouth.More after jump...

Ready to put women back in the story? If you care about amplifying progressive women's voices in the media, WAM! is for you, whether you're a media producer or a PR strategist, a journalist, an activist, an academic, a community organizer, a feminist, a funder or philanthropist, a "citizen" media watchdog, a media policy advocate, an alternative-network-builder, a blogger, writer, teacher, artist, technology trainer, cartoonist, deejay, or anything else.

If you are reading this you clearly have access to the internet, and therefore you have most likely read something about Oprah Winfrey's weight gain confession. The jist is this: Oprah weighed 160 pounds two years ago, and now she weighs 200. She "confessed" to the weight gain for the January issue of O Magazine, and now the interwebs are buzzing. The real issue here though is not the weight gain, but the crazy amount of attention it has received. Check out the attention we give to the attention, after the jump.

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Gruver, founder of New Moon, a magazine aimed at girls ages 8 to 12. New Moon is great – they're ad free, have girl editors and writers. They have a girl blog. Oh, and they're also based in Minnesota. 

Today in my inbox was a message from Nancy sharing the news that on September 1, they'll be launching New Moon Girls web community – like the magazine, it'll be ad free, girl-driven content. In the meantime, they're trying to raise money.  

Help them out, won't you?  It's a rare thing to find media aimed at building up girls' self-esteem rather than tearing it down. 

So last week I tried to buy my plane tickets to the ever-awesome Allied Media Conference in Detroit, June 20-21. I was really looking forward to being in the presence of so many radical media folks, building coalitions, hearing about the work other people are doing, and just hangin' out. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a ticket under $600, so it's not going to happen for me this year. A lot of people are surely in the same situation, so I figured I'd spend some of what I budgeted for travel on helping other folks get there; if you can, please do the same (and consider donating to Bitch, too, to help with our very own Debbie Rasmussen's costs).

In other not-entirely-unrelated news (I can't say I'm unhappy about the high fuel prices driving up the cost of flying and driving and making people reconsider their destructive habits), on Wednesday morning Jen Angel (one of the founders of the late lamented Clamor and the aforementioned AMC) convinced me to go with her out to Chevron's corporate headquarters in San Ramon, California, to take part in a protest at their annual shareholders' meeting.

When I moved to Madison to go to school several years ago, all I knew about the city was that people often referred to it as the "Berkeley of the Midwest" because of its history of radical politics. And while – like Berkeley itself – that intense thread of resistance is not nearly as palpable as it must've been back then, the vibe of the city is still very progressive. As one example, I don't know of any other city in the United States with as many worker collectives/cooperatives.

I am hoping that the B-sides blog won't become a weekly RIP to independent publications - but then again, maybe it will wake us all up, myself included, to the reality that independent media is becoming increasingly more difficult to produce and that we can create opportunites to do something about it, otherwise we'll wake up and it will all be gone. That all sounds fine and good to say and think about and then five minutes later we are all back to our green teas and talking about what happened on Lost last night.