Independent publications need to pursue ways to penetrate the larger marketplace in order for their messages to be amplified, according to Linda Jue, of the Independent Press Association (IPA).
A lot of publishers of IPA-member magazines and publications don’t understand why they should support a media-reform movement because they already feel they are actively pursuing media reform, Jue said today during a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis.
“Part of the media-reform movement has to be about creating a new, viable, credible independent media that will reach out beyond the pews [of the converted],” said Ju.
There are now only four major periodical distributors in the United States, said Jue, and they typically won’t carry independent publications. She said college students always ask her where such publications can be found. “They are our natural constituency,” she said. “But one of those four distributors controls distribution on college campuses.”
“We don’t have an amplification system,” said Jue, a former journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Public Broadcasting Service. “The things you and I in this room take for granted . . . most people in the United States who rely on mainstream media, newspapers, magazines and broadcast, don’t know.”
For example, she said, in conversations with reporters over the years about the coverage of affirmative action, she said she was told by the reporters they could not cover the substance of the issue “because they were driven by the horse race aspect of it.” She added: “Every time they tried to get into the substance of it . . . their editors told them tye really couldn’t, because the New York Times wasn’t covering it that way.”
Ju, director of new voices in independent publishing at IPA, said she and others turned to independent media “because that is where we can do the kind of journalism that we got into the business to do. But we an’t do it without resources.”
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