Review of infoshop.org

Date:

There are a large number of anarchist news services on the internet - one of the best ones covering North America is the news section of infoshop.org. The site looks a little like Indymedia, including readers' comments with articles but in fact all articles require prior approval by an editor.

This means that the number of articles per day can be kept fairly low and that the editors can select alternative sources over mainstream ones. The disadvantage is that the selection of course favours the editors' preferences - this means at times infoshop is dominated by anti-organisational theory pieces which are generally of pretty poor quality.

Here, as on Indymedia, the ability of the reader to comment on articles is important. This often leads to long discussions on theory articles which are often more useful then the original article. This also allows for controversial (or just plain wrong) interpretations of events to be challenged. It also means that the site has become something of a community for a wide range of North American anarchists to discuss events online with each other.

The areas of news covered by infoshop vary with events as might be expected. So at the time of writing detailed reports from anti-war protests all over the USA dominated the newswire. This is its real strength, at times of mass protest it offers multiple reports on what is going on.

http://infoshop.org/inews/
 


This page is from the print version of the Irish Anarchist paper 'Workers Solidarity'

Print out the PDF file of WS75
This edition is No75 published in March 2003