The first day of the Nat’l Conference on Media Reform was fun and exhausting. Most satisfying is that we carried off all the mp3/shoutcast audio streams without a hitch, maxing out the bandwidth for most of the streams. I think that means people were interested in hearing the sessions and that it was a valuable service.
This evening’s concert at the Orpheum theater was amazing, and we understand that our webcast of it was picked up by unlicensed micropower stations in Madison and Champaign-Urbana, in addition to KPOO in Oakland, CA, and possibly WORT in Madison.
The concert itself — the kickoff for the Tell Us the Truth Tour — was an amazing musical event, bringing together the likes of Billy Bragg and Boots Riley of the Coup for all sorts of performing combinations on stage. Combine that with some interesting speakers — all of whom kept things short enough to be engaging and not lose momentum — and a nice 15 minute “informercial” for media reform, and it was a pretty inspirational night… and fun.
For the first half of the show the theater was definitely filled past capacity, and the audience that stuck around for all 3.5 hours kept the place moving.
I think it’s important to keep this sense of fun and culture going alongside all the serious talk about media reform and action. I’m aware that it also serves to get us whipped up pep rally style — but what’s so wrong with that.
I blogged the opening remarks of the conference over on the Be the Media! Blog. I took notes during the Global Media Reform session in the afternoon, but there was no active web connection, so I still have to upload them. There was some serious blogging going on today, so you can really get a sense for the conference just by reading folks’ various accounts of the sessions.
And tomorrow, we’ve got more webcasts, the IMC caucus and a cool session of Be the Media! focused on micropower and LPFM radio.
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