Occupied.

Yesterday I walked by a protest and was handed a flyer. Not such a big deal in a college town, but this flyer caught my attention. Here is what it said:

The flyer was a response to a local Occupy Wall Street protest that was going on by the arch in downtown Athens.

Now, since reading this flyer I have discovered that these are NOT the actual demands of the Occupy Wall Street protest. There was a list of demands posted on occupywallst.org but they were posted by a single user, not by the organization.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/

I am not here to comment on the protest or take a side but I will say I was relieved to find out that these were not real demands. They are outrageous, but the flyer got my attention. I wanted to find out exactly what was going on.

I discovered a lot as I read about the protests but what sparked my interest the most was the Occupy Wall Street's newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal.


First of all, I was surprised to hear that they were printing a paper at all. Newspapers are not people's main source of information anymore (see previous post). According to the Pew Research Center's The State of the News Media Report, ad revenues (which make up the majority of a newspapers overall revenue) at newspaper organizations fell about 6.3 percent last year.

Well, this paper is different than most, it is funded by donations through Kickstarter, an online pledge system that is focused on funding creative projects. According to kickstarter.com The Occupied Wall Street Journal had 1,241 backers and $54,310 pledged as of October 7 (11:30 a.m.).

Even though this paper is not at all objective because #1 all the money comes from people supporting the protests and #2 all of the writers are taking part in the protest, the articles are still worth reading. If you don't know about Occupy Wall Street and want to learn more, there are some really well written articles explaining what its all about.

If you want to learn about the protests, the best articles to read are “The Revolution Begins at Home” by Arun Gupta or “Occupation for Dummies” by Nathan Schneider.

I particularly enjoyed "Pushed Out of Our Homes and into the Streets" written by David Kempa. The article opens up with a personal story about his mother and step dad who are being kicked out of their home. He describes their situation and then goes into his own story.

"Never did I think about covering finance or national politics," Kempa writes. "Never did I want to write about our nation's financial crisis."

But now he is. He is writing for The Occupied Wall Street Journal and very passionate about the protests. He closes the article explaining what the protests are for and the attention that they have gathered.

His article is so effective because he makes the reader understand why he got involved and why he cares so much about the topic. By understanding his passion, the reader understands why the protesters are out there, even if they don't agree with the cause.

If you want to learn more about Occupy Wall Street check out the official site or see the rest of the paper.

Unfortunately, there is no official pdf version on the website, what I have linked you to is just a photograph, but it is readable. For a protest that has nation recognition taking place in a society where most news is read online, it is absurd that there isn't a clean online version. I am sure we will being seeing it soon.