You are the mass media

Peter (our Director of Operations) gave an interview to Al Jazeera today about the Kony film (don’t worry this post is NOT about that).  One of the questions was

‘What did Stop Kony do that mainstream media is not doing in Africa?‘

But here’s the thing.  You are the mainstream media. You and your friends, and your friends friends. You’re the wires and you are the electricity along which the message travels, and if you want to be, you can even be the message too.

Don’t believe me?  Read these words by the student photographer Olivia Bohac  who recently went to hear London based photog  Ben Roberts give a talk

‘Above I have displayed one of Ben’s images from his body of work entitled Occupy Spaces (about the Occupy London protest). Ben told us that he shot this work as it was on his doorstep, it wouldn’t take long to put together, and it was very current at the time. Unfortunately for Ben, when he came to sending it to the editors, they were very much interested in the work but didn’t have space to run it that weekend.

Ben was very much aware that the work needed to be published ASAP. Nobody knew at the time the occupiers would stay for 5 months. He made one tweet with a link to the work and posted a photo on tumblr that got re-blogged over 100,000 times and eventually his work was spreading over the internet and got BBC coverage.’

The bad news is that getting stories to lots of people you still need the mass media. The good news is that you are it.