"You people
don't drink much decaf," the barista at the Bowling Green State
University Student Union told my friend as she purchased her morning
cup. "What is this conference all about? It's Sunday morning
and we haven't sold a cup of decaf all weekend."

The
eighth annual Allied Media Conference (AMC) had gathered in this small
college town south of Toledo the weekend of June 23-25. The weather
was exceedingly pleasant, the energy was high (and not just because
of the coffee), and more than 500 conference participants representing
the cutting edge of the media movement were there to push the limits
of activist media.

The
theme of this year's AMC was "From Truth to Power: Because being
right is not enough." As organizers of the conference, we
posed the questions, "How can alternative media go beyond merely
'speaking truth' and actually change the material conditions of our
world? How do we construct popular media projects that effectively build
grassroots power and advance social justice?"

This
critical framework aimed to challenge the distinction between media
activism and social justice organizing. We see the future of social
justice media not in the hands of an increasingly adept and politically
attuned corps of journalists, but distributed throughout the movement
for racial, social, and economic justice. Just as the proliferation
of participatory media has blurred the line between media consumer and
producer, the line between activist and media activist is disappearing.

More
so than at any prior AMC, the grounding vision of the 2006 conference
was that of media justice. We saw how the combination of a clear political
analysis formulated by the people most impacted by the media system
with an alternative communications infrastructure emphasizing direct
participation can be the basis for a mass movement to radically transform
our local communities and the way we connect them across the globe.

We
had set a goal of including many youth organizations doing this kind
of visionary work in the conference, groups such as Youth Rights Media
(New Haven), Youth Media Council (Oakland), Yo! The Movement (Minneapolis),
Street-Level Youth Media (Chicago), Campaign Against Violence (Milwaukee),
Global Action Project (an international youth organization), Elementz
(Cincinnati), Radio Rootz (NYC) and Detroit Summer. Most of these
organizations sent youth participants to the AMC in addition to adult
organizers. All led workshops and had youth or adult representatives
speak on panels.

An
early workshop in the conference schedule presented by Kat Aaron of
Radio Rootz outlined that group's program of media justice organizing
within NYC public schools. Radio Rootz's curriculum builds media literacy
skills as students critically analyze how the corporate media portrays
youth. Students in the program are taught radio production skills
and produce their own radio segments depicting their lives and the lives
of their communities. These youth-produced segments are then broadcast
on New York's WBAI-FM to a listenership of over 300,000.

In
addition to the workshop on their curriculum and organizing strategy,
Radio Rootz founder Deepa Fernandes was a keynote speaker of the conference
and three young people from the program also attended.

The
Palestine Education Project (PEP) is another group that brought their
vision to the AMC. PEP facilitates youth-centered workshops "to
raise awareness about the Palestinian struggle and its connections to
the experiences of oppressed communities in the US."

Presenting
to a mixed audience of young people and adults, PEP organizer Ora Wise
ran through an abbreviated version of a typical PEP workshop and taught
participants how to run such workshops themselves. She used the work
of Palestinian/Syrian-American filmmaker Jackie Salloum, who spoke on
the conference's keynote panel, including "Planet of the Arabs,"
a film collage of racist Hollywood depictions of Arab people, and "Meen
Erhabe (Who's the Terrorist?)" a music video of the Palestinian
rap group Dam. This video was a powerful example of how Palestinian
youth are using hip-hop to express their resistance to Zionist occupation.

Wise
showed a third video of African American youth in Los Angeles responding
to "Meen Erhabe" speaking about how their lives and struggles
are relatable to that of youth in Palestine. Overall, the PEP
workshop was a demonstration of how multimedia popular education can
open young minds to new understanding and solidarity across borders.

By
centering the work of these youth-focused organizations, the 2006 AMC
pushed further the boundaries of what this conference space is about.

The
AMC began as the Midwest Zine Conference in 1999. The 150 participants
fit into a common profile: young, white, anarchist, punk. Over
the next two years, conference organizers Jen Angel and Jason Kucsma,
who had by then begun publishing Clamor Magazine, renamed the gathering
the Underground Publishing Conference as magazines and book publishers
got involved and people started to come from across the country.

In
2003, the conference was again renamed, this time as the Allied Media
Conference. The name-change was meant to reflect the introduction of
new networks of media activists to the conference, such as the thriving
network of US-based Independent Media Centers and the nascent microcinema
movement. Throughout these years, the demographic of the conference
stayed pretty much as it had been in 1999.

Since
2005, the AMC has centered the work of media justice groups with a strong
race, class, and gender analysis and who are committed to community
organizing and movement building. This year's conference grew
to include many more young people and was much more racially diverse
than it has been in the past.

"We
are creating a communications infrastructure for marginalized communities,"
explained Betty Yu of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), speaking
on the panel, "Is This What Democracy Looks Like?" which opened
critical questions of how to make media that advances social justice
and is accountable to local communities. At MNN, Yu advocates
for the continuation of Public Access TV and works to provide media
resources to grassroots social justice and community groups. "Media
for what? Information for what?" Shivaani Selvaraj of the Philly
IMC Media Mobilizing Project, another panelist, asked. The panel also
included Francesca Fiorentini of the War Resisters League and Susana
Adame of the Radical Women of Color Bloggers Network.

In
Friday's keynote, Taishi Duchicela of the Youth Media Council discussed
her organization's "Unplug Clear Channel" campaign.
The Campaign organizes young people in the Bay Area to analyze how Clear
Channel-owned radio stations are negatively depicting youth and disrespecting
communities. The youth in the campaign then create their own alternative
media and lobby the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the
licenses of offending stations. The campaign is an impressive
convergence of media literacy, media production, and media policy-based
strategies, led by the people most directly affected by corporate media
dominance.

Other
AMC sessions helped advance this dialogue of how independent media-making
is being integrated with organizing. Hip hop-based youth groups formed
one panel, groups working to impact state media policy through community-based
strategies formed another, and independent journalists and organizers
from New Orleans spoke on independent media responses to Hurricane Katrina.

On
Sunday, there were more focused workshops along these lines: Elena Herrada
led one on "Oral History as an Organizing Tool," focusing
on the process of documenting the stories of Mexican American elders
in Detroit who were forcibly repatriated from the U.S. between 1929
and 1939;
Polk award-winner AC Thompson introduced people to investigative reporting;
and Deepa Fernandes, author of a forthcoming book about the Immigration
Industrial Complex discussed the complexities of covering immigration
and immigrant communities.

The
AMC also played host to caucuses of graphic designers, youth organizations,
community radio activists, and the Radical Women of Color Bloggers.
In formal meetings such as these and through informal conversations
during the Friday night bowling party and the Saturday night music party,
the AMC served as a space for extensive networking and relationship
building.

For
eight years, Bowling Green has played host to the Allied Media Conference.
At this year's conference, a major announcement was made: the conference
is moving to Detroit. The AMC has traveled a long road from where
it was in 1999 to where it is in 2006. But the road from Bowling
Green to Detroit will take it to a place of even greater possibility.

This
year's AMC saw a large number of participants from Detroit who brought
the history, vision, and vitality of the city with them to the conference.
Detroit Summer brought nearly two dozen young Detroiters, adult organizers,
and artist mentors to the AMC, using the weekend to launch the group's
summer program, the Live Arts Media Project.

The
AMC also hosted numerous Detroit-related workshops and panels.
The panel "Creative Uprising: Art Transforming Ourselves and Our
Communities" included the OTHER Arab Artists Collective, a Detroit-based
collective of Arab artists; and Will Copeland, poet-philosopher and
native Detroiter.

The
panel "Representing Detroit: Telling Our Own Story Through Independent
Media," which Jenny Lee of Detroit Summer moderated, featured Catherine
Kelly, publisher of the Michigan Citizen newspaper; Ron Scott of the
Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality; and Roshaun L. Harris, editor
of Hush Your Mouth! newspaper.

The
Saturday night music show featured an almost all-Detroit line-up.
While 13-year-old hip hop prodigy MsFortune represented for her Toledo
hometown, the rest of the show was all Detroit. Soul/rock band
Velvet Audio kicked out some serious jams as the show opener.
Ever the crowd-pleasers, Invincible and Finale showed us everything
that a hip hop performance can be. Folks that had never thrown
their hand up at a show were pumping their fists in the air. DJ 'munk
closed the evening with an impeccable set of funk and soul, channeling
all of the energy of the conference onto the dance floor.

"[The
AMC] was one of the best conferences I've been to. It was great to be
from Detroit. At the AMC, Detroit represented hardcore," stated
Michelle Lin, a member of Detroit Summer.

While
the delegation of Detroiters attending the AMC left feeling energized,
we recognize that the task of bringing the AMC to Detroit will not be
easy. As organizers of the conference, we have a lot of work to
do to make this national media gathering something that is relevant
and accountable to Detroiters. There is a tremendous legacy of social
movement in this city; to organize here is to walk in large footsteps.
We are building towards June 2007 with a sense of humility and opportunity.

In
a post-AMC article she wrote for the Michigan Citizen, Detroit poet
and youth organizer Angela Jones, who traveled to the AMC with Detroit
Summer writes: "Everywhere they went, Detroit youth were recognized
and greeted with warmth and respect. …'Hey, Detroit!' fellow organizers
would shout, and our youth would beam. …People are expecting great
things from us, as well they should, and they are coming to witness
the power that we possess as a community. …When asked what the next
media conference theme should be, a [Detroit Summer] youth joked, 'AMC:
Better than the Superbowl.'"

For more
coverage of the 2006 Allied Media Conference, visit

www.alliedmediaconference.org.

Mike Medow
was an organizer of the 2006 Allied Media Conference, is a member of
the Detroit Summer Collective, and an editor of Critical Moment.

Joshua
Breitbart has been an organizer of the Allied Media Conference since
2003. He writes regularly about media on his blog, http://josh.fm.