Sunday March 2 is the date for the yearly Grass Roots Media Conference, a major movement event in New York organized by the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition. It's taking place at Hunter College this year.

For the past four years, we’ve come together to explore the political dimensions of media and how it shapes our lives. By developing relationships between community and media organizations, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition is working to re-imagine issues of access to, control of, and power over our media system. That means defining our struggle as a struggle for Media Justice.

Media Justice recognizes the need for a media that comes from, and is responsive to, the people, ­a media that addresses systemic marginalization and discrimination and that speaks truth to power. Media Justice asserts that our communities and airwaves are more than markets, and that our relationship to the media must be more than passive consumption. Media Justice recognizes that the form of our current media system is not inevitable, but the result of an interplay of history, technology, power, and privilege. Media Justice seeks to integrate efforts to reform our media system with a social justice agenda, in order to create not just a better media, but a better world.

We invite you to join us at the 2008 NYC Grassroots Media Conference as we seek to define our understanding of and relationship to Media Justice as a community, and explore how we can not only envision an ideal world, but to make this vision a reality.

Download Conference Information Packet

For more information please call 917.523.1045 or email info@nycgrassrootsmedia.org

May First / People Link has been involved in the conference all along and this year will be as active as usual: a table to come ask our techies any questions you want (about tech issues, of course) and our workshop which will be an exercise in collaborative development of an Internet Documents of Rights. That's the extremely well-received exercise we did at the US Social Forum.

If you're in the area and interested in media work, this is a conference you should definitely should attend. Come and look for our May First / People Link table.