Josh Stearns has worked for Free Press as a campaign coordinator for just about a year. He had worked for a number of non profit organizations previously, and then went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, he studied how NPOs use language and literature to affect change. “When I was in that sector,” he said, “I realized that communication was an uphill battle. Nonprofit organizations don’t have the resources to be investigative journalists and the media is broken as it is. It’s easier for them to get their message out by way of a public service announcement than it is to get a reporter to cover an issue in depth.” While he was studying language and communication in the context of these organizations, Stearns says that he realized that the media would have to change in order for a difference to be made and this helped to bring him to the organization.

Free Press will host the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis from June 6th through the 8th.

We talk a lot to people who are doing a lot of outreach and organizational work using the Internet. Based on the advocacy work that you do, why do you suggest issues like these are important to pay attention to?

[With our work on The Future of the Internet initiative], one thing that struck me is the diversity of organizations who care about the Internet. Groups ranging from the Christian Coalition to the NRA have gotten on board with MoveOn and the ACLU. It blows my mind to think about that and I am thrilled to work with an organization that has such strange bedfellows. What unites them all is their feeling that the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool for cultivating community and getting the word out about their issues. It helps to foster for them a dialog. If at any point in the future those applications [of The Internet] are limited or targeted for a slow-down or if “the pipes” are squeezed, that is a huge threat to free speech online. The Internet should be a level playing field for all of that.

How would “the pipes” be squeezed?

There are two good examples of how this might happen. Companies like AT&T and other [Internet Service Providers] have suggested that in order to start making money on the Internet–as if they weren’t already making money on service and subscription fees–they need to create a two-tiered system regarding the way the Internet works. There would be the fast lane where pages load instantly and the slow lane where it takes some more time for content to load. Partner companies, who fork over the big bucks, could use the fast lane while everyone else–like non profits, small businesses, and local governments–would be stuck in the slow lane. What is worrisome is what this would do to innovation, competition, and access for all people, as it would give people with more money to compete the upper hand in the marketplace.

The other was is by simply blocking some services. Comcast, for example, was caught blocking some people’s peer to peer (P2P) activity by stopping BitTorrent downloads. There is a real stigma related to P2P services where people think that they are only for pirated music and software. But these services are used by lots of companies and organizations from NASA to FOX to MTV. Comcast has their own download system that competes with that. The AP revealed that Comcast was blocking these services, which prompted a formal investigation by the FCC including two hotly contested public hearings at Harvard and Stanford. We believe that this kind of blocking and slowing down the web goes against the very democratic principles that the Internet was founded on, and is a real threat to the political, social, and economic potential of the net.

How do you bring attention to these issues using the Internet? How do you organize folks who want to get involved?

We like to say that we are able to help people use the Internet to save the Internet. We do it in a variety of different ways, none of which are based solely online. We run on and off line campaigns, where we try to connect the grassroots to the net-roots. We always back one action up with another. For example, if we do a petition or letter drive, we do so online and people can take some time to click a button and sign their name to a letter to a politician. It is a standard online action. But then we reach out online to find people in each area who can then print those letters out and personally take them to the office of the politician. We want people to be engaged at all levels.

Additionally, we want to create community and build the movement online and offline. We want to provide a place on our site where people are able to talk about what they’re doing and share resources. We have recently created the Free Press Action Network to provide an online activist forum. People can blog there and talk about each other’s blogs. They can discuss the media reform issues as they relate to local communities

How is that working out?

It is new, but it is growing. We have more than 2000 people who have signed up for accounts. It is becoming a lot more interactive and it’s helping people to connect in new ways. We have regular chats of between 100 and 200 people. We have had two former FCC commissioners, lawmakers and media scholars on the network. It’s an exciting and dynamic way to give people direct access to policy makers in DC.

Recently Sen. John Kerry was blogging on the Action Networkabout what was happening with Internet legislation on the Senate floor and he asked for feedback. He received hundreds of comments and he took those to the hearing and introduced them to the formal record – even reading some aloud. It’s a way for people to instantly have a place at the table in Washington DC who would have otherwise been left out based on where they live. Sen. Kerry took those comments and submitted them to the record, so now they’re part of the debate.

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