"Picketing Henry Ford" - Panel Discussion on Atlantic Yards and Grassroots Media February 24, 2007

Picketing Henry Ford - The political economy of the Atlantic Yards

Part of the NYC Grassroots Media Conference.

A panel discussion with bloggers Lumi Rolley of No Land Grab and Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report and a spokesperson from Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

If you are interested in attending, you can save money by pre-registering for the conference on the NYC GMC website: http://nycgrassrootsmedia.org/register2007_pre

An overview of the planned discussion:

This panel will address the grassroots-media response to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Though the response was not coordinated and arose organically, it can serve as a model for other communities and struggles facing a well-funded, sophisticated media machine.

Whereas the project’s developer had access to many mainstream media, the opposition’s responses to it coalesced around websites, blogs, and message boards. Two primary watchdog blogs, whose writers will speak on this panel, Atlantic Yards Report and No Land Grab, exemplify how committed citizens can use available technology to inform communities, journalists, and lawmakers.

The former began as an independent journalist’s response to inaccurate coverage of the Atlantic Yards project in the The NY Times and grew to become a fact-checking site that offers fact-checking and a counter-narrative enabled by the myriad information about the project available online from the government and the developer, as well as in mainstream publications.

No Land Grab is a clearinghouse for any and all information relating to the project, with links to stories from both the grassroots and the mainstream, allowing interested citizens to follow the project as it has unfolded in real time.

A spokesperson from the umbrella opposition group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn will speak about the effects of independent and grassroots media on the struggle over the Atlantic Yards. This panel reveals the paradox of corporate message hypermanagement: although corporations and governments attempt to control every aspect of their public presentation in all media forms, the proliferation of media allow concerned citizens access to heretofore unavailable information, shedding light on the inconsistencies, distortions, and failures, as well as the strategy, of the message control.

In the case of the Atlantic Yards project, an overarching message encouraged by the developer was race- and class-based divisiveness, and this panel will show how grassroots media can expose divisiveness, and its connection to top-down planning, through rigorous analysis of such tactics.

Official Website: http://nycgrassrootsmedia.org/register2007_pre