#indiemedia — Public Fediverse posts

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Today's issue: three stories, Countless sources, one obituary laid out date by date, zero ad networks.

1991. 2005. 2011. 2016. 2019. 2023. Checked.

3 hours. No AI, no ad network, written by a lonely poor transwoman

#Journalism #IndieMedia #Trans #Writing #News #QueerNews

wendythedruid's profile - Libe...

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We run our own server for this. Owncast, self-hosted, ours — https://live.thistleandmoss.org?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS — then YouTube @wendythedruid and https://stream.place/thistleandmoss.com?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS for whoever's already there.

What do you actually want me to chew on Monday?

#Fediverse #SelfHosted #Owncast #Journalism #IndieMedia #QueerNews #TransRights #USPolitics #Podcast #Livestream
2/2

Monday I'm going to say out loud the thing I couldn't fit in 800 words this morning: that the 4:34 a.m. vote and the jobs report are not two stories. They're one story, and the timing of the first tells you exactly what they thought of the second.

#Fediverse #SelfHosted #Owncast #Journalism #IndieMedia #QueerNews #TransRights #USPolitics #Podcast #Livestream
1/2

Please join us, Thursday August 27th for a screening of Concerning Violence edited to meet Twitch's terms of service standards here: https://www.twitch.tv/unsettlingempire

This film, featured in our Letterboxd film list, is meant to be a visual companion to Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth". We believe this film is a must-watch for those who are looking to learn more about colonialism, how it functions, and how to combat it. #ThirdCinema #AntiImperialist #Communist #IndieMedia

We run our own server for this. Owncast, self-hosted, ours — https://live.thistleandmoss.org?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS — then YouTube @wendythedruid and https://stream.place/thistleandmoss.com?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS for whoever's already there.

What do you actually want me to chew on Monday?

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2/2

Monday I'm going to say out loud the thing I couldn't fit in 800 words this morning: that the 4:34 a.m. vote and the jobs report are not two stories. They're one story, and the timing of the first tells you exactly what they thought of the second.

#Fediverse #SelfHosted #Owncast #Journalism #IndieMedia #QueerNews #TransRights #USPolitics #Podcast #Livestream
1/2

Today's Gathering: three stories reported out, fifteen sourced links, six cities checked, three people named for what they actually did.

No ad network. No AI. Written by a human at a kitchen table in Georgia.

That's the whole overhead.

#Journalism #IndieMedia #NoAI #QueerNews #News #Fediverse

Liberapay, if you'd rather your money didn't route through anybody's payment empire: https://twp.ai/9OZjfT
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Writers — what's the one thing you refuse to let a platform decide for you?

#WritersLife #WritingCommunity #IndieMedia #Fediverse #Journalism #ReaderFunded #Liberapay #Solidarity #MutualAid #SmallWeb #AmWriting #MutualAid #MutualAidRequest
2/2

If you value independent media & queer fiction, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

If you cannot afford a subscription right now, your solidarity is just as valuable—please amplify this post! Every boost helps this reach someone who can provide financial support. Thank you so much! 🙏✨

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2/2

Having coffee, while waiting on Mom's GP's office to call me back.

My Briarpatch magazine arrived today. It's one of the Canadian independent media magazines that I support. Their website is currently undergoing maintenance but their about us page is readable:
https://www.briarpatchmagazine.com/about-us

#SupportIndieMedia #BriarpatchMagazine #IndependentMedia #NonprofitMedia #IndieMedia #Canadian

This publication runs on people, not billionaires. If today's edition kept your feet under you, back the advertisers who keep it free, like Two Bad Tourists and their 80,000 LGBTQ+ travelers. A click is the soil we grow from.
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100 founding seats in The Daily Gathering, ever. Founders steer where it goes — and can host the live broadcast, Mondays & Tuesdays at 1pm.
Not a tip jar. A hand on the wheel. No oligarch, Just me and you.
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100 founding seats. That's the ceiling, and it doesn't refill.
Being a founding member of The Daily Gathering means a hand on the wheel — founders help steer where this thing goes, what it covers, what it grows into. And the live broadcast every Monday and Friday at 1pm? The host's chair is open to founders. You don't just read the room. You can stand in it

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100 founding seats in The Daily Gathering, ever. Founders steer where it goes — and can host the live broadcast, Mondays & Tuesdays at 1pm.
Not a tip jar. A hand on the wheel. No oligarch, Just me and you.
https://twp.ai/4hriWz

#FoundingMember #QueerNews #IndieMedia #Pride #LGBTQ #Community

We carried all of it today — Newark, the spy tier, the killed wind farm, Hemphill's fire. No billionaire funds this. When you click an advertiser, you're not buying anything — you're buying us another morning to write. Every click is the next sunrise we get to meet you in.
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"I am eager to burn this threadbare masculinity." Essex Hemphill wrote that mid-plague, while a government refused to name the dead. He died at 38 in 1995. We hold his line in the sternum today.
https://twp.ai/4hsJSG
#EssexHemphill #Poetry #QueerHistory #Pride #LGBTQ #BlackQueerHistory #AIDS #Resistance #QueerNews #IndieMedia

A fresh GLAAD poll of 5,000+ adults: just 8% name trans issues a top concern; 44% say inflation. Nearly 3 in 4 want candidates who let everyone live free from fear. The public already sees through the distraction.
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Today's Gathering: Iran on the clock, Brussels drowning for $750B in oil, Lady G's voting record, lemon balm pharmacology, Beltane's early honeysuckle, and the heroes still showing up sick. This newsletter survives because some of you decided witnessing matters. Click an ad. Costs you nothing. Keeps us breathing.
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Arlington’s embarrassing waste of a low-power FM license

For the first time in many months, I tuned the radio in our car to 96.7 FM Thursday evening and realized I hadn’t missed anything: WERA, Arlington County’s sole low-power FM station, was once again playing a canned loop of instrumentals, without a live human voice to be heard.

That this rated as an improvement over the dead air previously on that frequency shows how far WERA has fallen from the promise of “LPFM” after years of funding problems compounded by what seems to have been rampant mismanagement bordering on fraud. All of this ineptitude, as ArlNow reminded me in a report Wednesday afternoon about the station’s unexpected but unstaffed return to the airwaves, has left the station in a zombified state.

In other words, WERA has become the sort of lifeless broadcaster that it was created to counter.

When this station went on the air on December 6, 2015, dozens of guests packed Arlington Independent Media’s studio in Clarendon and toasted its debut with sparkling wine in plastic cups. Advocates of LPFM had spent a decade lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to ignore the opposition of incumbent broadcasters and authorize a class of nonprofit, hyperlocal stations; almost five years after President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act into law, listeners next door to Washington finally had their own indie LPFM listening option.

WERA almost immediately earned a preset on our car’s radio for its delightfully eclectic mix of music and talk programming, which the limited reach of its 21-watt signal meant I could only hear within a few miles of the station’s transmitter. As I wrote at Yahoo Finance in late December of 2015:

The station has since served up a free-form mashup of music that you almost never hear on commercial FM. One DJ with his medium on his mind followed R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” with Donna Summer’s disco hit “On the Radio” and Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio,” but the selection has also extended to French chanteuse Edith Piaf and 1950s mambo king Pérez Prado.

But over subsequent years, the ongoing decline of cable TV left less of a subsidy for Arlington Independent Media from taxes paid by Comcast on that revenue. Arlington’s government chipped in, but the real problem was not income but expenses. In March of 2024, ArlNow reported that the county had suspended further payments until it could complete an audit of AIM, while AIM staffers alleged “reckless” management of the station’s funds.

(The irony of one small, independent local-media organization doing such a good job of covering another small, independent local-media organization while the Washington Post has ignored this story is duly noted.)

Days later, AIM sacked its entire staff and took WERA off the air. The county’s audit, finally published in February of this year, revealed seriously sloppy financial management under former CEO Whytni Kernodle that included inadequate documentation of more than $1 million in expenses over two-plus years. The County Board referred the matter to a special prosecutor who then declined to file charges against Kernodle.

(My wife works for the county government’s IT department but thankfully has had no role in any of this.)

Things could be worse: The lack of paid employees somehow did not stop WERA from getting back on the air in time to prevent the FCC from revoking its license. But as ArlNow’s Dan Egitto wrote Wednesday, the entire operation seems otherwise dead on the inside. Would-be AIM turnaround president Amanda MacKaye told him that she’s no longer on AIM’s board or otherwise involved with the organization, nobody still on the board answered his questions, and the County Board seems set to wash its hands of this whole ugly affair.

You shouldn’t read this an indictment of LPFM, which was and remains a good idea and a useful antidote to soundalike corporate FM. The D.C. area’s other LPFM station, Takoma Radio, has been on the air since 2016 at 94.3 FM, and the chance to listen to WOWD on the way to and from D.C.’s Costco makes the traffic a little more pleasant. I’m listening to its stream as I type this.

But you absolutely should read WERA’s miserable saga as a stupid squandering of cultural potential. And everybody in media-policy circles who worked so hard to make LPFM a reality should be angry about it.

#943 #967 #ArlingtonIndependentMedia #ArlNow #broadcast #freeFormRadio #hyperlocal #indieMedia #lowPowerFM #LPFM #mediaReform #radio #RadioArlington #TakomaRadio #WERA #WERALP #WOWD