[www-features] snitch jacketing story posted on indymedia newswire

[Modemand Guitar]

I've hidden newswire articles whenever asked for more than 6 years. I do 
  not alert www-features very time I do that, unless it directly 
involves   editorial collective issues. Most often it does not.

If people want www-features involved every time someone wants an email 
address or phone number removed from a newswire article, we can discuss 
that. Frankly I would love the help.

Lately a few people have responded directly to these requests just like 
me and I never brought this up because I was just happy people were 
helping. We never seemed to step on each others toes or anything, and it 
never seemed to make sense to add more hours per week of work to our 
consensus circle.

Should we formally discuss whether to remove personal information from a 
post? There's a chance we would never have time to generate feature 
stories if we built a formal procedure to handle something like that.

Really the ideal place to handle these requests is:

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/www-newswire

I don't know when and why people started contacting www-features for an 
issue with the newswire except maybe that there is often overlap such as 
my being in both circles, etc.

Perhaps www-newsire wasn't responsive enough and someone then took 
things directly to the www-features collective getting things taken care 
of right away and that became the norm?

We never discussed this dynamically, it just sort of evolved that way. 
I'd like to know how others feel about this, and wonder if anyone has 
suggestions how we can make this work more smoothly without creating 
more work for a small circle of people already overburdened.



Petros Evdokas wrote:
> Sue Scandale wrote:
>> I see that the article that Petros requested to be taken down on the
>> 11th ( http://www.indymedia.org/en/2008/10/914360.shtml) was, indeed,
>> hidden on February 11.
>>
>> However, the article is still accessible by following the above link,
>> it still is listed in the archive
>> (http://www.indymedia.org/en/newswire/archive656.shtml) and the link
>> from the archive is still active.
>>
>> Any thoughts on why this might be happening?
>>
>> --Sue
> 
> 
> Sue,
> Thank you very much for following through on this.
> Also, my thanks to whoever is the unidentified imc volunteer who tried 
> to hide the article - but please, friend, whoever you are, it's always 
> best to let people know about taking such steps, and about any problems 
> encountered along the way. Transparency and sharing updates is one of 
> the best ways to cultivate and maintain trust.
> 
> Trust among indymedia workers is already poisoned enough as it is, 
> especially with the actions of people among us who are members of work 
> groups and yet keep behaving as if they do not want to be accountable to 
> their colleagues.
> 
> Below are letters exchanged with the person who originally alerted us 
> about the offensive article. I believe they are still relevant; I'd like 
> you to have a copy.
> 
> Thanks,
> Petros
> ________
> 
> DA wrote:
>  > Hi Petros,
>  >
>  > Thank you for your thoughtful reply.  Does Indymedia have any procedure
>  > in place for taking posts like that down?
>  >
>  > all the best,
>  > Don
>  > ---------
> 
> 
> Don,
> 
> Thanks for writing. I am a member of the editorial working group, and
> yet my opinions on such matters of policy and editing most often go
> either porposefully ignored, or purposefully opposed. I believe this is
> a testimonial of how low our network has been sliding in recent years.
> 
> I would ask you to keep sending polite, but firm, letters to
> www-features to keep requesting a deletion on the basis of:
> 
> - the articles in question constitute violation of editorial policy
> (character assasination, libel, defamation);
> - publishing those articles constitutes an injury to the political
> process of the movement (any branch of it such as environmentalism,
> etc), whereby we are allowing the dissemination of UNPROVEN anonymous
> accusations against activists, risking a danger to their lives and liberty;
> - this kind of publication is a violation of due process (rights of the
> accused in any Court) and is a degenerate form of "peoples' justice". It
> constitutes the worst example of "trial by the media" through rumour and
> innuendo, rather than by a procedure of dialogue, presentation of the
> case through credible EVIDENCE, etc.
>