MEDIA FARM: THE TWEET HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

The battle lines have been drawn in the city, both on the ground with its occupants and its government, and in the media: on one side, the alt-weeklies, twitterati and alternative sources of information and on the other, Fox 25 and friends.

Monday night, Media Farm found themselves in the thick of the circus. #OccupyBoston, the movement which had been holed up on the Greenway for over two weeks, was coming face-to-face with a reckoning from hundreds from the Boston Police Department, but the media was there … also in the hundreds. Television cameras from the big four stations were mainly positioned on side streets, their telescoping antennae reaching to the stars. Field reporters stood by, ties loosened (perhaps showing solidarity?) while the younger citizens/alternative journalists were in the mix with iPhones, Twitter, Flickr galleries and YouTube ready to fire.

Alternative sources like UNregular Radio were on rooftops.

Photo by Dex Mutha Fukin Ter of UNregular Radio For the rest of his pics, click here.

Underground networks like OpenMediaBoston had deployed numerous correspondence.

Liz Pelly, a young writer for 45 year-old Boston Phoenix was so embedded she tweeted this the next morning:

woke up with no voice from screaming all day yesterday &the number of the occupy lawyer’s guild scrawled on both of my arms in black sharpie

At some point or another Monday night, the boundary between journalist and protester became so blurred that indie media simply gave up on objectivity.

In the turmoil, the focus of all media attention was Twitter and the hashtag #occupyboston, which was moving along at an alarming rate. Little did we know by the next morning that API would be challenged to go 10, if not 100 times faster.

7 News WHDH (@7news) had their all powerful eye in the sky on duty. “STREAMING LIVE: Sky 7 is above the Occupy Boston protests.” Reporter Tim Caputo (@tcaputoon7) reported, somewhat erroneously, that “I was just told by @Boston_Police that our camera isn’t allowed to be on Dewey Square.” … perhaps because it is so cumbersome to carry.

WBZ Boston (@cbsboston) seemed even more distant:

BPD hands out flier to #OccupyBoston protesters reminding them that if they are asked to leave an area and refuse, they will be arrested

A little closer, if not further away in bias, was Fox 25 WFTX and reporter Sharman Sacchetti (@SharmanFox25). “Occupy protesters surround themselves w yellow tape,” she said posting a wide-angle TwitPic. “Police nearby on bikes, wagons parked a couple blocks away.”

This from a station who ran with a story earlier in the day which claimed “police officers are being paid overtime with your tax dollars” and that the protesters were “using power outlets at the park, which is the city’s electricity.”

And we love NECN, the little cable channel that could, but they were saying “BREAKING: Livestream showing #OccupyBoston protesters still linking arms, surrounded by Boston police” with no link to said Livestream.

The eventual winner of this indie vs. corporate battle was none other than the biggest little paper in Boston. If you’ll allow us to gush for a bit, but somehow this paper’s own Lauren Metter, who had spent the summer at various gigantic electronic music festivals, had thrown herself into the thick of it. Tweeting under the handle @haveyoumetter, “#occupyboston now bpd” included a yfrog.com picture that was nowhere near any streetside opposite.

Then a YouTube video was quick to follow. In its two minutes and 30 seconds, we see the Police Department move in on the Greenway, especially approaching the Veterans for Peace. The police then take down their flags, one of which is an American flag, and take the veterans to the ground. At one point, there is a lone voice: “I am a veteran of the United States of America.”

The video was picked up by the Boston Globe, then Gawker Media, then Huffington Post. By Noon on Tuesday, the Washington Post had included it in their Occupy round-up and Lauren was taking phone calls from reporters at the Guardian UK. As of now, the video has received over 190,000 individual views and the tweets are innumerable.

Media Farm would never normally call attention to the goodness of media, especially our own,

but in this case indie media had proved itself so vastly superior to their corporate counterparts, we felt a tip of the cap was in order.

And doff we shall.

TIPS? THOUGHTS? MEDIAFARM@DIGPUBLISHING.COM OR @MEDIAFARM

BACK to all of the Dig’s #occupyboston coverage.