http makes us all journalists.

Something I did made the paper a year ago, and I just now found out about it:

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/09/anonymous_circulates_diy_press.php

The blog article mis-attributes the quote “http makes us all journalists” to Peter Fein, who I’ve never met or had any dealings with, but I actually came up with the slogan, and the 1.0 design of the press pass. [Update: It turns out that I have met Pete, but it was long after the fact of the BART protests. In fact, without realizing that he was the same person from the article above, I met him and his wife Elizabeth at Notacon9. I’m happy to report that they’re wonderful people.]

After I created the design, and it was put up the noisebridge wiki, I remember at the time a number of journalists took offense to the slogan, completely missing the point of it while being defensive about their college major or profession. I guess it stings when your career is threatened by the emergence of a new medium that the old guard doesn’t understand readily, misses the boat on, and you watch newspaper after newspaper go out of business or get swallowed up by corporate media conglomerates.

I get that Journalism is a serious discipline and has standards, most of which are completely gone from broadcast and publishing these days, but whatever, they’re important standards. Saying “http makes us all journalists” wasn’t meant to insult your diploma, your profession, your Peabody, or your Pulitzer.

The point was that the slogan is directly after a quotation of the full text of the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press. The internet, especially http, enables all of us to be our own press. Freedom of the Press isn’t just freedom for Journalists, but for artists and authors and everyone who has a mind to express thoughts with. “With HTTP, All Can Publish” might have been a more accurate slogan, but I came up with the idea in about 10 minutes, and I like the spirit of it, so I’ll stick with it. Frankly, I’d rather there be more agitated journalists in the world, rather than the corporate media shills that have largely supplanted them, while abdicating the Fourth Estate for a comfy paycheck. If you’re a journalist and the slogan pissed you off, good. If it inspired even one person in the general public to take up the mantle and aspire to become a serious journalist, even better.

I created the design when a friend in SF tweeting about the Bay Area Rapid Transit protests, that were happening at the time, said that people who didn’t have press passes were being denied access to the protest area. The protests were in response to a police shooting and killing of an homeless man who was on the prone on the ground at the time he was shot, and not a threat to anyone. That shouldn’t have happened. I felt strongly that the protesters had a right to protest and a right to cover their own actions and publish about it, so I created the press pass. It took maybe a half hour, a couple of rectangles in Illustrator, and I was done. The idea that the right to be present to cover an event should be limited to those who possess a Press pass struck me as an unconstitutional abridgment of rights reserved for all. So I created a Press pass for all.

The version I created didn’t have the photo of the Guy Fawkes wearing person in the ID photo. My idea was to take your own passport photo and put it in there — I measured everything out carefully to be sized correctly, and made the card the size of a ISO spec for an ID card that I found details on the internet.

The image at the right is the symbol for Noisebridge, a SF hackerspace that I’d like to visit someday. I ganked the image from their website and incorporated it into the design, since the friend who got the idea started was affiliated with them, and they were involved to some capacity in organizing the BART protests. I’ve met some cool people from Noisebridge who I consider to be good people: bright, conscientious, inquisitive, concerned.

The reverse of the press pass had the text of the First Amendment and the slogan “http makes us all journalists” which I meant to emphasize the fact that the internet is a truly democratizing force, enabling each and every one of us to communicate with everyone else, reaching people we might never otherwise have known about, and impossible to censor… though, they never do quit trying.

Someone else put the Guy Fawkes image in there, but you could just as well replace it with your own image if you wanted, as I originally intended. The “points system” for doing this or that with the pass to make it more authentic looking was also someone else’s idea, as was the information resources to help people know their rights. Each contributor acted freely of their own accord to contribute their ideas and built off of them without ever talking to each other. It is what you make it. Modify to suit your needs. Do what you want, be responsible for what you do. That’s the power true freedom gives you.

I’m not a member of Anonymous, as I’m not posting this anonymously. Anonymous does some good, some bad, just like anything else. I don’t know anything more about them than what you can read on the internet.

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More favorable coverage, with an image of the original design:

http://lafiga.firedoglake.com/2011/08/23/http-makes-us-all-journalists/

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  1. My wife, a “real” journalist, says there’s no official press pass that get’s you past police barriers like people think. The exception being when groups like the Cleveland Film Festival has their own press passes that they send to people, but that’s for more of a private event and not what you’re talking about. So your pass is just as legit as any for covering protests or anything else public.

    She agreed that unfortunately people don’t see bloggers as “real” journalists, even though some blogs are read more than some print media.

    I love the idea of this about making your own pass.

      

  2. That’s all true. When I looked into press passes and who issued them, and so on, I found out there really wasn’t a lot of legal basis to them. A news organization might issue a press pass to its employees to identify them as working for them. A venue might issue press passes to select journalists who they want to give greater access, such as a backstage pass. Or the police might issue them for similar reasons. The bottom line is that if you need one in order to get access, then it’s de facto censorship for anyone who doesn’t hold a pass.

      

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