August 2008 Archives

[...] This Obama campaign, which I have probably cursed by saying this out loud, looks from the outside like a well-run, contemporary business: seemingly the right mix of enthusiasm and discipline, encouragement and focus. I view organisations like that as a sort of minor miracle, because the working environment has changed so radically in the last decade that I despair of anyone getting it right. You're safer using the old disciplines, but at a cost: that's what makes your company or image appear distant and inhuman compared to the bumbling, chaotic but adventurous alternatives. Bush's skill was appearing human despite that kind of frozen discipline, and you only had to see how badly Gore and Kerry were at imitating the same relaxation to see the challenge of covering up all that machinery.

I suspect that if Obama gets in, they'll be an awful lot of Fast Company-style books written about this campaign, and how to build your business the same way.

That's how Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka post "the business of barack" (via an instant message from Cecily) ends.

SAJAforum: What have been the most significant ways in which you have seen community-based journalism evolve and change over the course of your career?

As media, technology and politics merge, it's become possible for people with few resources to create their own media outlets and disseminate widely. Communities of color are still struggling to get themselves into the mix, but there's far more video, blogging, writing and reporting than there was ten years ago. Activists of color know we're getting killed on cable news and in the blogosphere, so there's an urgency that I didn't feel from the field ten years ago. Giving enough focus to the storytelling remains a challenge -- getting specific, proving every point with reporting, finding people to tell the story through, carving up our journalistic projects into digestible pieces in the age of youtube, and just making sure that our production is high-quality enough to attract the unconverted.

[...] i end by saying, yes, let us protest, yes let us wear skinny jeans, but do not let this be the symbol of our activism. let the symbol of our activism be our activism. in other words, REMOVE THE SYMBOL! especially when symbols rely on the beholder anyway. [...]

[...] In Chicago, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based group following the grass-roots organizing principles laid out by Saul Alinsky. Alinksy, a Chicago native, famously organized the impoverished Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s and trained several generations of organizers, including César Chávez, before publishing "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" in 1971. (He died the following year.) [...]