Labo(u)r’s Media Strategy
I was on this panel at Labornotes 2010 on what the trade union movement’s media strategy should be. And Steve Zeltzer, the moderator, suggested that we write something about what were going to say and post it on the internet. I thought I’d oblige.
Here’s the blurb for the panel.
How new communication technology and media is being used today and how to develop a labor media strategy for the rank and file, local or international. Many new communication tools including social networking, video and audio are being used to break the corporate information blockade. We will look at how to use all these tools to win the media and information struggles.
Here’s what I said.
I thought I would do a sort of SWOT analysis of unions and the media living, as we are, in the middle of the transition to digital media. But first:
Stop thinking in terms of Newspapers, Radio and TV. Because the lines between all these things are being blurred and the delivery vehicles are changing.
Think in terms of text video and audio content. And accept that all this content is going to be delivered computer to computer over the internet. TV networks are toast. Over the air radio is toast. Newspapers are toast. (This was a controversial statement for the audience assembled but I made it out alive. A repeat invitation may not be forthcoming)
Americans already spend as much time online as they do watching television. In Canada it’s the same.
The fourth estate is not going away. But how people receive its wisdom, and how it functions and sustains itself is all changing.
So let’s think about how we can act to change the balance of power in the information war, in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Strengths:
Our members. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
Our values. Union values of mutual support and cooperation more closely speak to those of the general public. It’s what’s kept us together all these years and it’s what the corporate media work so hard to break down.
Oh – and money. While managing it can be a weakness, unions have more money that your average social change organizaation. And it comes in steady. Mostly.
Weaknesses
We are overly slow to adapt to change of any sort and changes in communciations technology are no exception.
Opportunities
The numbers on internet use are now to the point where they suggest near saturation. It’s not true that everyone has access to the internet but at this point it’s truly a mass medium. We have an opportunity to use it. And we should take every opportunity to use it.
If you don’t already have email addresses for all your members get them. Use every opportunity to do so.
Go where the members are. There’s this thing called Facebook that is four times more populous than California, Texas or New York State. Find your members there and bring them home to your website where you can collect their information safely and keep using even if Facebook kicks you off, goes bankrupt or starts charging for access.
Twitter is a great media relations tool.
But email is still the lingua franca of the internet. Even though it’s for old people. And you can use it to counter the messages the mainstream media put out. Take a lesson from the Obama campaign which so successfully managed hostile media by responding – not by begging for an op-ed or a meeting – but by putting out video on YouTube, emails to supporters and turning every slag into an opportunity to make a pitch for time and money.
Threats
They’re the usual. Capitalism and all its secondary infections. But the internet, as a child of the post public-interest era of government, is particularly vulnerable.
It was set up to survive a nuclear war, like cockroaches and grass. But there are huge corporate interests out there that would, through traffic shaping, DRM, packet filtering and other methods turn it from a neutral platform for exchange of ideas and information to a profit vehicle designed to enforce corporate control over access and content.
So the good news is, if ever there is a nuclear war, we’ll have a food source and thousands of Americal Idol outtakes to distract us from having to eat cockroaches and grass.
But the bad news is, we’ll have an internet owned controlled and run by corporate interests with no regulation, no public service requirements no nothing.
If we do not put together some sort of social enterprise or government agency that can act as a bulwark against the power of capital to buy or control the internet, we’re all going to be begging to pay big bucks to install RFID chips in our shoulders to get access to the net so that we can survive.
