Episode 5: Independent Protest Journalism

Jay Ulfelder: You are listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab Podcast. I’m your host, Jay Ulfelder, he/him. Together with Harvard Kennedy School professor Erica Chenoweth and other members of the Nonviolent Action Lab team, each episode we bring you the latest research, insights, and ideas on how nonviolent action can, or sometimes fails, to transform injustice.

It’s Wednesday, July 10th, and today we’re talking about the importance of independent journalism to our understanding of protest activity and social movements. For the past several years, I’ve spent the better part of almost every day making and analyzing data on us protest events for the Nonviolent Action Lab’s Crowd Counting Consortium project. Doing that work, I quickly learned that the richest and often the only coverage of many protests comes from independent journalists, people who report from the scene without the imprimatur of a commercial media outlet, often on their own time and at their own expense. I’m also constantly reminded by their coverage that the picture of protest activity we see in those commercial media outlets is often woefully and complete and biased in favor of status quo, preserving perspectives. Because their work’s been so valuable to mine, I wanted to learn more about how and why these reporters do what they do.

So today we’re going to talk with three of them from three different parts of the country. First, we have Talia Jane, a reporter covering protests and social movements in New York City whose work can be found on Twitter at @taliaotg. Next, we have Raven, who runs Jinx Press—that’s JINX—a collapse-minded independent media collective in Chicago that primarily covers policing, extremism, and social movements. And finally, from the West Coast, we have Sean Beckner-Carmitchel—I hope I got that right, Sean—a Los Angeles-based multimedia journalist covering protests, policing, homelessness, and whatever else he finds himself into. He’s best known as @acatwithnews. So again, thanks to all of you for making time to talk today. I really appreciate it. I wanted to start with what’s kind of the obvious question here. How would you describe what you do and how, why did you start doing this work? Maybe we can start with you, Talia, and kind of move East Coast to West via Chicago.

Talia Jane: Sure. So in 2020, that’s when I started covering protests and I started covering them because I was participating in protests and then I would go home and see media coverage that quoted the police and sort of told this alarming version of events at demonstrations that I was at that didn’t seem to line up with what I had witnessed and the secrets of events that other people around me had witnessed. And it felt off that the media was sourcing to the police as an authority on these protests when the protests were ostensibly against the police. So I decided to start documenting what was happening from the perspective of people who were in the marches. And I started taking video to confirm what I was saying was happening as a secondary, as proof that I wasn’t just spinning things or making things up so people could watch what was happening themselves and come to the same conclusions that I had determined in my reporting. And then from there, it just kept going. And four years later, it’s a dozen more movements that I’ve covered from the perspective of the people. I think that a lot of what I do is really about ensuring that that perspective is told so often left out and sidelined as biased or inaccurate or whatever positions of authority want to claim.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. How about you, Raven?

Raven: Sure. Yeah, just like Talia, I also started doing this work in 2020, I think a lot of indie journalists did, and similarly just sort of was out at the protest on my own, checking them out and documenting them, and then realizing that other people were watching the weird videos that I was taking of events. And that just sort of snowballed into freelancing for different publications and learning the ins and outs of journalism as an industry and growing really dissatisfied and frustrated with that. And so some other reporters and I sort of decided to just go in a different direction and form a collective, a media collective and try to do things not just differently, but also in a way that challenges the state narrative. And I think here in Chicago, especially with so much, we have so much gun violence and a lot of our news coverage from the broadcast media focuses heavily on that. And there’s an entire propaganda apparatus run by the state alongside CPD that we feel it’s important to be a foil to. So that includes covering protests and covering social movements, but also covering the police themselves and what they’re doing and learning how to file freedom of information after quests and look at attendance records and just dig deeper into policing as an institution. Because ultimately if you’re covering any sort of social movement, the police are going to be the number one thing standing in the way of your coverage and of the protests themselves.

Jay Ulfelder: Right. Yeah. And how about you, Sean?

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Echoing what everybody else said. It was 2020 at the time. I had just been furloughed from a position with a pretty large luxury brand company, and it started as I want to say it was something noble, but to be honest with you, it really started as me having video skills and not really having anything to do with ’em. So went out to the protests, started videoing them I guess more as a sort of protest videographer, and then gradually made some mistakes along the way and decided that really what Los Angeles needs is real hardcore on the ground journalism. So I do a little bit of stringing, I do a little bit of sort of independent writing, worked for a couple people and have found pretty consistently that as much as I love some of the reporters that work out of a desk, there’s just no replacement for covering things from the perspective of someone who’s there.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Yeah, it’s remarkable. I mean, one thing I noticed in the work I do is how much, and I only have been doing this for about the same amount of time you all are describing how much of what, of the reporting that cover or if you want to call it reporting that covers protest activity in commercial media outlets is repackaged social media content and police press releases and the like that very rarely somebody who was actually at the event talking about what they saw. Actually, one of the things I wanted to ask you all about, Raven, this was recently on the Jinx Press, Twitter, I don’t know if this was you or somebody else in the collective. There was a tweet that I read as follows, the Playbook. Since 2020, activists and indie journalists work exceedingly hard to appropriately explain what they document, conflict hungry news, aggregate vultures and lazy producers swoop in to stripp their work for parts. It’s an exhausting, infuriating, never ending cycle that resonated with me for what I was just describing. So I wanted to hear a little more from you all about that. Maybe you could talk a little more about what you had in mind there. And I’d be curious, Talia and Sean to hear some of your experiences with that kind cycle of recycling of coverage from these events.

Raven: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s pervasive. I think it’s true with any online content of any kind, not just journalistic content, but we live in a world now where anything you post online, anybody else can just grab and use for what they want. And so some people will try to put watermarks on their footage that can help, but there’s this whole other sort of industry of news content, mill style kind of accounts that give the appearance of doing on the ground reporting or journalism in some capacity, but don’t actually do it and just scoop different things that suit their predetermined agenda.

And there’s such a stark difference between that and something like what we do, which is going out to document an event, not with any agenda or notion of how things are going to go. We may have certain biases that we have to keep in check, but we’re not going out with the intention necessarily of controlling the narrative in that way. And then additionally, it’s broadcast outlets or major publications will sometimes also buy footage or video from journalists and repackage it or splice it or do something with what you sell to somebody that you may not have full control. Right. Editorial over, right.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Yeah. Talia or Sean, anything you all care to say about that process?

Talia Jane: Yeah, I mean, honestly in my perspective, there’s a lot of denialism in corporate media, and when I’ve been on the ground covering things, it’s sort of prevents against that reflex. So there was this Q Anon conspiracy theorist who got started with the tea party and stuff, and she started leading the anti-vax protests, and she was profiled by the New York Times as a teacher, and I went through, found that she wasn’t a teacher, she was a teaching assistant, and she stopped her job before any vaccine mandates happened. And on top of that, she wasn’t just a casual participant in these spaces, but she was organizing them and carried all of these other heinous extreme conspiratorial views, which ended up pushing the New York Times to edit their profile of her to remove the flattering angle. There was another time where a protest marched through Manhattan and a BC out of nowhere decided to claim that protesters threw barricades at cops, and that’s what provoked arrests.

There was video from that protest that I disseminated online that totally debunked that narrative. There have been protests that I’ve covered where the media has been generally hostile to the protests or has kind of failed. They create these false equivalents between far right extremists with really conspiratorial and heinous views as somehow equal to just regular marginalized people who are being impacted by those views. And then I show up and I film things that show that that is the dynamic, that it’s not this both sides concerned parents versus weird communist queer people or whatever. It’s like far right conspiratorial extremists who have been documented doing this stuff over and over and over again versus regular community members who support people just being who they are. And when that happens, you actually see the coverage change. It stops being hostile, it stops being skeptical of marginalized people being impacted by the far right. So for me, the work that I do is really, it upends this kand denialist perspective that is otherwise really pervasive in media that has not yet adapted to understand that the traditionalist neutral objective media perspective that worked for decades has been extremely exploited by terrible people looking to platform heinous propaganda to cause harm to a lot of different people.

So it’s kind of like real life fact checking in a way.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Yeah. Sean, what about you? Any of the, yeah, go ahead.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Regarding the news aggregators and things like that, one of the things that I don’t think that they realize is, particularly in the case of my footage, that’s food for me, that’s one of the ways that I survive. And while I don’t love the monetization ecosystem that exists when you just real quick screen cap footage that I’ve taken or things like that, it’s money out of my pocket, and also some of that footage is taken, I’m sure all of us in this chat can identify with this. All of this is footage that is taken with some level of risk occasionally great risk to me. So that part of the ecosystem is frankly pretty ghoulish.

And the quote tweet button is right there, right? It’s right there. You can use it, it’s fine. I release my footage to Twitter for a reason, and a lot of times, as someone who’s recently started covering things that were not at places that I was actually at, there is a lot of resistance from traditional editors towards active language. I think that great journalism uses occasionally neutral language, but it needs to be active language. So for instance, if you’re at a protest and one guy grabs a bat, it’s a dude over the face with a bat, and then two people struggle to get the bat away. I don’t think it’s responsible to call that a clash because again, it’s not active language. You can say, man, A took a bat to somebody’s face and then two people beat him up and took the bat away. That’s perfectly reasonable to say, but this idea that we should be using words like scuffles, flashes, things like that, occasionally in the moment it makes sense. I’ve been towards plenty of really gnarly fights and things like that where it genuinely is unclear to me in the moment how it started.

But with that moment, once I’m reviewing footage or in the footage, usually if you look for 10 seconds, you go, oh, okay, I see what happened here. And that’s when it’s time to go, okay, man. A took a bat to somebody’s face, and then some people took the bat away. And it’s also a little concerning, particularly with extremist groups and things like that. Some of them are becoming extremely media savvy. Some of them are doing training sessions with rather large think tanks here in la. I’d imagine that’s probably happening if not in Chicago, that surrounding areas that’s happening in Milwaukee. And as journalists, we all independent or not have a responsibility to go, Hey, who is this guy who’s talking on my microphone? Maybe I should take 10 seconds to Google him before I put him on the national news. Yeah,

Talia Jane: Yeah. That’s like in LA there was the Christo fascist March around Dodger Stadium. Do you remember that, Sean, where the media was?

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: There were a few,

Talia Jane: Well, there was a big one where the media profiled a bunch of people and then indies went through and were just like, oh, this person is part of this far right extremist group. Oh, this person’s a proud boy. Oh, this person is X, Y, Z. And it was just none of that was mentioned in any of the coverage. It was just concerned parents and things like that. I think it often speaks to the time crunch that media has to just get stuff out to feed the beast, but it’s also just willful laziness. I think, especially when things are so much, there’s so much at stake with being accurate and having context, and they just evacuate that responsibility.

Raven: We had a really similar incident here where a nightly news broadcast program on WTTW did one side versus the other about book bands in school libraries. And their concerned parent was a proud boy and capital rider, and it was a thing that we personally emailed producers about. There were community members who were in up or about it. They were aware that this happened, and there was just never any sort of acknowledgement about the mistake. And like Talia said, it’s like there’s a crunch for time, there’s laziness, and I think we are the ones really informing the public. And when you try to couch everything in this both sides, language, language, it’s a dereliction of duty as a journalist, if you consider your duty informing people, because people leave these conversations usually more confused about the issue because the language isn’t clear.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Sean, a moment ago you mentioned you were talking a little bit about personal risk. That was something I wanted to ask you all about. I know at a recent protest against a real estate marketing event, let’s call it that out a Los Angeles synagogue, you and I think seven or eight other reporters on the scene were verbally and physically confronted by counter protestors and in some cases violently attacked by them. I wondered if you feel comfortable with that, telling us a little bit more about what happened there, and then maybe all of you can say a little bit more about some of the personal risks you deal with in doing this kind of work.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Yeah, so I think that was two weeks ago now. There was a pro-Palestinian protest outside of as Torah synagogue in Pico Robertson, and it started pro-Palestinian protestors were protesting a company which was having sort of a real estate event. That particular company had sold condos in the West Bank, which is condemned by both the US State Department and international law to do. It’s unclear right now, I’m pretty close to figuring out if in fact that event they were specifically selling that property as part of their portfolio. But Pico Robertson is probably the most heavily Jewish neighborhood, not just in Los Angeles, but probably west of the Mississippi. And not just Jewish, but specifically Orthodox and Pacific.

It’s sort of the lifeline of the Jewish community of Los Angeles in a lot of ways. So I came in, I think perhaps being a bit more realistic about how it was going to be received than a lot of people, as someone who’s pretty familiar with the neighborhood. And pretty much from the jump things were really contentious, people getting in people’s faces, shoving those sorts of things. Eventually, and this is where I’m a bit critical of LAPD here, they cleared the area in front of the synagogue, which to be honest with you, fair enough. But they kind of cleared everybody just on the Pico, which is the street, and they cleared everybody pretty much together. So everybody was just in the street now, right next to each other. There wasn’t really any law enforcement in between both sides. And that’s when things took a pretty large turn towards the not great. I saw a couple assaults on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some macing from pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

It was a lot. So then the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and it’s unclear to me if they were attempting to leave the area or if they were just attempting to march down Pico, but things basically devolved even more into pro-Palestinian sort of walking through the residential part of the streets. And that’s when there were a few just full on just assaults of people that were just nominally walking. Once things got back to the area around the synagogue is when you felt the, I think everybody here knows this feeling when you feel that switch flip when you’re like, oh, boy, they’re going to get mad at anybody with a camera. Now it’s that time of the day and thought about leaving. But I never do that unless the job’s done felt like the job wasn’t done.

Saw a couple of journalists being chased, ran over to ’em to a film what was going on, and B kind of plead with the crowd. They ended up picking my phone out of my hand. It was kind of an impressive kick, to be honest. And another indie journo actually caught it, which again, pretty impressive. Once that happened, they just sort of surrounded the two of us, and I realized in the moment that there was no way to run from the crowd. And also, I am a big proponent of never run away from a crowd that’s mad at you either A, for the philosophical stand, your ground idea, and B, there were just too many of them. I’m sure one of them is faster than me. Once you run, that sort of gets people to chase you, and when people are chasing you, they get even more mad. So we kind bear hugged each other to kind of get the front of ourselves ready and sort of stabilized. And then both of us got punched and kicked a couple

Jay Ulfelder: Times. I’m sorry to hear that,

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Talia. And for clarity, I think it’s about, sorry for clarity, I think the number’s eight or nine journalists were assaulted physically.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah, yeah. Talia and Raven. One, just wondering, to whatever extent you’re comfortable sharing about these personal risks, you all confront doing this work?

Talia Jane: I mean, I’m currently being doxed. Oh, Raven, did you want to go first?

Raven: No, you can go ahead. I need time to say,

Talia Jane: Okay. All right. While I’m currently being doxed, I’ve been assaulted by people who, I have all these conspiracies that are constantly being floated about me, accusing me of being in charge of everything, and I sending people to do things. And I’m the New York’s George Sorrows, just these incessant conspiracies accused of My favorite is that I’ve been accused of organizing the January 6th Capitol riot and that I sent the anarchists to DC to coerce Patriots into rioting against cops. I don’t really understand what the point of that was other than, oh, I think it’s because I’m a fed op that was working with the FBI to lock up Patriots, which seems like a really roundabout way to go about that. But in any case, the conspiracy is alive, and it certainly informs people and incites them into violence against me. I’ve had my press card stolen. I’ve been assaulted, I’ve been doxed. I’ve had unwanted things sent to my home. I’ve had family and friends threatened, and it’s just this constant background noise of people just cooking shit up about me. I’ll be in the middle. I was in the middle of just working yesterday, and I found out that I was being accused of directing some right wing guy to Ds and harass some other right wing guy that he knew,

Which was ultimately just some BS that the guy made up to try and get in the other guy’s good graces by being like, yeah, Talia, I think he said that I coerced him and threatened to send my Antifa members after him. And this is a guy who runs around boasting that he has a gun. So the idea that he’s intimidated by me, and you’ve met me, I’m a petite little marshmallow. The idea that he was intimidated by me and some unknown mysterious goons is pretty laughable, but not so laughable that people are sensible enough to brush it off. And as a result, I’m getting targeted and harassed and threatened because of people making shit up and then believing it. I’ve been targeted by the NYPD who insinuated that I am not truthful in my coverage because my coverage debunks their bullshit and they’ve stolen footage from me while also claiming that I don’t show the full picture. And then they use my footage muted to obscure the fact that I was screaming that they were arresting press to create a propaganda clip knowing that they should not do that and that they were fucking with the wrong one. But it’s just this environment of bullying all because I am one little account that says, oh, I don’t think that’s true. It’s ridiculous. The amount of violence and hate that is lobbed towards people who just say what they see.

Jay Ulfelder: And I’ll just interject briefly to say I am confident there’s a gendered aspect to this too, but we’ll leave that for another time. Raven, how about you?

Raven: Well, yeah, I mean, I know you said leave it for another time, but obviously there is a gendered aspect to it. If you’re perceived as a woman online, you’re going get twice as much you ask, but I’ve had random people send me genital photos. I’ve had all kinds of bizarre things happen alongside just the run of the mill Toxing and all of those experiences that Talia, I’ve experienced nothing like Sean described being by a mob. I think that’s definitely my worst fear that something like that would happen, that I would be cornered and attacked. I’ve been assaulted and have had experiences that concern me that they could go that way. And Talia, I was at the Capitol Riot, for example, and that was sort of the very media hostile environment, but it also never got to that level, which I also think speaks a little bit too to kind of the difference in how sometimes size can actually be a protective factor versus at a smaller sort of event where people recognize you.

And those are all things that I think we all think about. It’s not just wake up, go cover this potentially volatile event. It’s like there’s background research involved in looking into the different people who might be there. How do they feel about journalists? Is the threat level elevated? What kind of safety gear should I bring? All of those kinds of things. But even I would say the greatest risk, honestly, is to our mental health. I think we witnessed a lot of traumatizing stuff over and over again and we don’t get to check out. And that to me is so much worse than cops and Nazis talking made up shit about me.

And it’s hard. I think in some ways journalists are a lot like first responders, right? It’s like frequently we are first at the scene alongside law enforcement of very intense situations involving high. I don’t even cover gun crime or other things where you might be seeing people on the worst day of their lives, right? Reporters who cover stuff like that too. But we’ve all witnessed violence and trauma and it does wear on you after a while. I don’t think anyone is immune to that or if they think they’re immune to it or probably in themselves. Yeah.

Talia Jane: Oh, could I just interject on that real quick, please. I have a huge co-sign with what Raven said because we’re in the middle of these crowds that are getting assaulted and grabbed and people are screaming and they’re terrified and they’re getting brutalized. And our job is to withhold the reflex to want to help people around you who are being hurt and instead point your camera at them, which is, it’s kind of a nauseating experience to just have to focus because you know that those people are going to be helped by your footage at a later date,

Even if you can’t help them in the moment. And to have to witness it and remove yourself from your reflexive humanity to make sure that you document it as well as possible, and then to have to review the footage and at times repeatedly review it because there’s other stuff that you miss later on, or there’s a specific thing that you want to isolate out of it, or you have to cut it down. If after a bunch of brutality things settle down and you continue filming for 20 seconds and nothing happens, cutting out that knowing where to cut at the end there. So that way then other people who watch this footage actually pay attention to it and care about people being hurt. It’s this really gross process that is traumatizing because you don’t get to actually process what you’ve experienced. You only get to process the footage to distribute it outwards. So that way then people might realize that this thing that’s happening is bad, and that way then the media will not run a story that misrepresents what happened, to make sure that they tell the story correctly. And to have this kind of information, responsibility and to put aside just you as a person is awful.

It’s just awful. We all deserve therapy, especially the protesters that we document, but it’s gross. And I just kind of wanted to expand a little bit more on the process of it so that way then people really understand the different types of trauma. That’s not to say that what we experience negates or outweighs the trauma of a protester being brutalized, but that it’s a specific, very unique experience. That is something that I think if people are considering getting into this should take into consideration.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Ray or Sean? Well,

Raven: I would just add that if you find yourself feeling divorced from your humanity during that process too, it’s like that’s a sign that you’re not one of the good ones. You should be feeling all of these horrible feelings because these horrible events are happening in front of you. And I think that’s also what the three of us, our audiences probably gravitate towards our coverage for is because we have found a way to include a little bit of that humanity in a, I don’t know, non-biased sort of way.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: If I can interject on please two things. I think it is really important to state that I think female journalists absolutely get more vitriol and deal with more hateful language. It’s as many awful things that have happened to me. I’ve never had somebody screaming in my face that they’re going to burn me at stake. I’ve never had anybody scream in my face threats of sexual violence. I don’t want to say a regular occurrence, but it’s common enough to where it’s a thing. And I am noticing this is just my viewpoint, obviously, but I’m also noticing that

That particular threat really does seem to be increasing over the last few years, particularly as we’re seeing more anti L-G-B-T-Q rallies, which the relationship between anti L-G-B-T-Q sentiments and sentiments against women is perhaps a bit above my pay rate. But I think we can all agree that there’s a relationship there. And as far as traumatization and things, for me, I’m pretty much always looking through a viewfinder or looking at framing and things like that. So what’s common for me is actually in the moment, I’m really not processing much. It’s later when I’m cutting the footage or reviewing the footage for a piece that the challenges to mental health start to increase.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Well, thanks all of you for talking about that. I think it’s really important for people to understand and appreciate that, especially those of us who consume and benefit from the work you do. I also, I understand this is not a well paying job and is probably rarely something you can make a living doing, and I was hoping you all could talk a little more about that, how this fits into your making, being able to get groceries and pay rent and stuff. If it does, Sean, maybe we’ll go left to right this time. Start with you.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Yeah. I mean, independent journalism, it’s hard to make a buck and it’s only getting harder. Just in Los Angeles alone, we saw Knock la, which as a regular contributor to sort of, I guess I’ll put it nicely, have the rug pulled out under it because of editorial mouth. We saw La Taco, which was very much a freelancer hub here. They were still alive, but they were really in trouble and being pretty open about that. This is a national outlet, but the Daily Beast just had pretty significant layoffs. It’s looking like The Intercept is kind of in the middle of that. We’re seeing a lot of potential outlets go away for a business which was already really struggling. So not a lot of people know this, but up until very recently, I was working a 60 hour a week job on top of filming everything, just because that’s the way to live Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. None of those are cheap places to live, to say the least. And if you’re listening to this and you like, what one of us do, please support us. Lord knows I want to have the fancy ice cream every once in a while.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Raven, how about you?

Raven: I mean, Sean and I still do have work.

Jay Ulfelder: Oh, sorry. You cut out there for a sec.

Raven: Can you hear me?

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah.

Raven: I was just saying that Sean and I also have had to, it’s not a money making endeavor in any fashion, and also like Sean said, it’s just getting worse. I think the industry is in collapse in some way. I mean, I think society is also, I think it’s unique to journalism, and so I try to, this sounds very odd, but I try to look on the bright side in that of watching these other publications hold apart. As much as that is brutal, I try to just think about what we’ve been built and place. That said, it has just been a money safe up until this point. A lot of that has to be with my own personal sort of, I don’t know. I think I’ve been hesitant to ask for money, I guess, for what we do, but we are reaching a point where we’re doing more and more long-term investigations and we need money. So at some point we have to ask more, but I think the model itself is broke, right? If used

Jay Ulfelder: To be

Raven: Behind newspaper and the money reporters could have an apartment and live on money writing features in a magazine or something, and now everything’s on social media, everything’s online, everything’s cutthroat. There are people willing to work with nothing. And then also because everybody has smartphones now, outlets that would traditionally pay freelancers or freelance journalists with things they can buy footage from regular people can buy, or they’ll just offer it to them, right? Yeah.

Jay Ulfelder: I see a lot of those requests in the threads on Twitter. Somebody posts something interesting, and there is the, hi, this is so-and-so from this, can we use this please?

Raven: And to be honest, it’s like most of the time that footage is just not taken with the same level of skill

Jay Ulfelder: As somebody

Raven: Braids a camera for. So it’s not just like, oh, they’re getting it from other people. It’s like it might not show the whole story way. But yeah, I mean, as far as finances go, I don’t know what else to say other than we are still figuring it out.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Yeah. Holly, how about you?

Talia Jane: I mean, for the last four years, it was just hand to mouth. I had a Patreon that I had, people could support me there, and it was very tiny amounts. I would say probably less than the federal minimum wage. You have to take out 30% in taxes for anything that’s not a regular W2 type of job. So it was hand to mouth. It’s been hand to mouth. I racked up a bunch of debt on a credit card, and I really just lived off of the generosity of others. If I made a post saying that I needed help buying groceries, people would send funds for that. If I noted that I was just struggling and stressed out or that I couldn’t afford to go cover something, people would step up and help. So it’s this collectivist effort where the people who were consuming my reporting were very much the ones who were making it possible, and that’s how I was able to survive.

For four years. I went into it not interested in licensing footage. I still don’t care about licensing footage. I recently started watermarking stuff just to deter against the abuse of far right accounts that steal footage and then disseminate bullshit to make it that way. Then people have to find the original, they can find the original and see the correct factual information attached to it. But for a long time, I didn’t bother watermarking at all. I always kind of assume that that was just something that you do to signal to news outlets that you would sell all your stuff or whatever, and I was content to use footage to kind of verify vibes or specific incidents that I covered. It wasn’t that I was going out there with the intention of filming the best shots. It was I want to document how this feels, how this sounds, how this looks for people who can’t be here to get an understanding of what it really looks like separate from how the media reports it. So for a while, that’s just what I did. I recently got a job that’s pulled me off the ground, but it’s one of those things where I think what we even said society’s collapsing, so is the media industry. I’m not precious about anything that I currently have. I just kind of assume that it’s eventually going to fade away and we’re all going to be replaced by ai.

So for me, I don’t know. The whole point is the work, and I’ve had really, really dire times. Something that I learned to do that kind of helped is that if you pay your electric bill on one month and skip your gas and then pay your gas the next month and skip your electric, you won’t have to pay both at the same time, and that affords you more leeway in making your dollar stretch. Also, if you prioritize proteins like garbanzo beans and tofu, those are really cheap forms of protein. You can survive a little bit more easily than if you’re trying to buy meat and you can just not think about all of the fresh produce and veggies that you could be eating. They just don’t exist for you right now, and you just get comfortable with that. Before I started doing this work, I had been working as a line cook, a dishwasher, a barista. These are low wage jobs, and so making this stuff work was just second nature because the whole of my adult life was financial hardship. And I’ve had people tell me, I don’t understand how you afford it. I’m like, I don’t either. You just figure it out. You hope for the best, and then maybe sometimes you have 10 bucks and you can buy yourself a bag of chips and an ice cream.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Yeah,

Jay Ulfelder: Right. Like Sean said, sometimes you want to have the good ice cream.

Talia Jane: Yeah, but I mean, those are expensive. That’s like $6 for a pint or seven some places. So that’s a splurge, and you don’t really have a choice if you’re doing what you love, you don’t care how much it costs or doesn’t cost, or you don’t care that it’s a struggle and you don’t care that you’re stuck in that corner. You’re like, I’m going to do this because it’s the passion that fuels you. That’s what fills your tummy when you’re hungry. Also, sometimes just drinking a little water before bed can help.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Sorry, can I, oh, sorry.

Talia Jane: No, go ahead. I just realized that I ranted for a really long time about that. I’m sorry.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: I will say that there is one, I don’t know if you guys are seeing it, but there’s one really funny sort of positive that I’m seeing, which is it’s become sort a regular running joke on my Twitter account. Whenever you get the, hi, I’m from this network, do we have permission to license your stuff? It’s become a tradition that people will just dog pile and say, pay him on Twitter, which I’m enjoying. In fact, one of my bigger videos over the last few months, pay him received like 700 likes or no, it wasn’t pay him. It was, I always reply, please, the end me for rates, and that received like 500 likes. So there’s a positive in that. I think people are starting to realize, at least in some sections, that what we do is a grueling, brutal job sometimes, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone who has a grueling, brutal job to get an ice cream once a week. And as far as the hardships go, about a year ago, things hit a point where I had to vacate my home. I just couldn’t afford to pay the rent anymore. And some folks set up a GoFundMe and helped get me out of that, which I’m very grateful for. But also, my mom helped me out a lot just by reminding me, as long as my cats are fed

And as long as I have some garbanzo beans and a can opener, I’m good. That’s all I need. The

Talia Jane: Garbanzo beans, man,

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: I have a great love of garbanzo beans, not just when I’m doing poorly, but I’m also, I’m a sommelier and have worked as a beverage director and things like that. But fun fact, if you take the water above the garbanzo beans in the can and add it to a cocktail and shake it, it’ll create something called aquafaba. So you’ll have this beautiful, beautiful foam.

Jay Ulfelder: My wife has used that to cook. It’s

Talia Jane: A replacement for

Jay Ulfelder: Egg whites. Yeah, vegan egg lights. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like too, another thing that’s coming through here is there is a community, and it’s kind of remarkable to me even hear the three of you who, whether you’ve interacted talking before or not, I know you are all aware of each other’s work despite being spread across the country. And it does seem like there is a community that has each other’s backs to the extent that that’s possible. And sometimes literally as you were describing Sean in LA, and that doesn’t pay the rent, but that is a good thing.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: I was going to say, speaking of me and Talia have met in person, I don’t think I’ve met Raven in person, but I have a suspicion I’ll see at the D NNC next month come what? Come what may,

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah.

Raven: Yeah. I’ve never been out on the West Coast at all, actually. But the DNC is coming. Chicago will be very popular for five days.

Talia Jane: Yeah, I actually, I messaged Draven asking if I should bring my ballistic gear.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah. Are you all planning to be there in Chicago or is anybody going to Milwaukee?

Raven: I’m going to Milwaukee next week, to be honest. Not to get in the business of making ground prices. I am going to have to revise this maybe in a couple weeks. I actually don’t think that the DNZ will be as well amping it up to be mostly just because, I don’t know, the temperature on the ground here is relatively low, and we also have a supposed allied to mayor in office, and I think that one thing I’ve noticed over the years doing this work is that movements in general tend to inflame when there is a local antagonist. And we saw that a lot with Lori Lightfoot. She was very hated by a lot of people, and that bled out into just sort of how hard protestors went in 2020 and 2021. And personally, I just haven’t been seeing that this summer. And I think it has a lot to do with who are mayors. And I know in New York, Eric Adams is also not well-liked, and I’ve seen New York protesting nonstop for months. So I don’t know. In my opinion, I think that’s the difference.

Jay Ulfelder: Interesting.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Well, if you ever want to get covered in Bear Spray in the most beautiful weather you ever had, let me know.

Jay Ulfelder: Well, it

Raven: Seems like things out there have been pretty intense for a while now.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: It comes in waves. Los Angeles never caught quite as gnarly as Portland did during what’s sort of commonly called the Fed War, which I don’t love that language, but that’s what it’s called. The thing that seems to be the common thing in LA is when the wave hits, it hits really hard. So be that protests and counter protests, those tend to be fairly large and fairly, let’s call ’em actionable and also kinetic.

Jay Ulfelder: Isn’t that the Defense Department’s word for it?

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Kinetic. Yeah. Let’s use the most neutral language we can and call it kinetic. But also we go, oftentimes we’ll go months where the only protests are a few, 200 people walk around type of protests. So it really does come in waves. But I think LA, when it does pop tends to pop more than most places, and I think that that’s kind of a West coast thing. I could be wrong.

Talia Jane: It seems like, from what I’ve seen from coverage pretty consistently that there will be the far right aggressors and then people protesting that they’re attacking, and the LAPD just kind of takes a nap pretty consistently. They kind of just let the far right do whatever they want and they don’t pull up for a while, and when they do, then they grab the people that are being attacked. I don’t know if you’ve seen something different on the ground, Sean, but from what I could see, it’s an extremely obvious bias in LA that we don’t really see elsewhere.

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: Sorry, I lost the mute button for the most part. I think that that’s definitely a sentiment. I have seen that happen a lot. Occasionally you’ll see a situation where it’s like everybody’s pretty chill, and then somebody throws a glass bottle at a cop’s head, and then the cops will go to arrest that person, and then it turns into a bit of a scrum. I mean, that does certainly happen. I’ve certainly seen that happen a few times, but particularly when it comes to counter protests, it does seem, at least to my eyes, as though generally speaking, when there is a counter protest and a protest, whichever side the left ends up being on is usually the side that’s policed for.

Jay Ulfelder: Well, I want to be mindful of all of you your time, so let me just say thanks very much, and maybe we can close out by going around the horn and giving you all a chance to let anybody know how to find you and how to support you if they want. And why don’t we, again, go East Coast to west and start with you, Talia?

Talia Jane: Yeah, so people can find me on Twitter, X Talia, OTG. I haven’t been on the ground much, so support your local mutual aid instead of me, but I have stuff pinned on my page if folks feel so inclined.

Jay Ulfelder: Yeah, Raven,

Raven: We’re at jinx press.org. That’s our website that I really need to update more than we actually do, and also on the Hill site at JX Press and Instagram and all those other little ones that popped up that nobody’s actually using now, like Threads and Blue Sky. If anyone’s still on that, we’re probably there.

Jay Ulfelder: Great. Sean, how about you?

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel: I am on Twitter and Instagram at the Cat with news on YouTube. I’m at a cat with news on Substack. I’m at a cat with news. There’s always links to, if you really want to support me, feel free to sign up on my Substack stack. There’s a little option there for a donation or a recurring donation. And if you don’t have any money, because a lot of us don’t, Hey, just put me on YouTube and just keep playing my videos. That helps too.

Jay Ulfelder: Terrific. Well, thanks very much again, everybody. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and I imagine others will as well.

Thank you for listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, hosted by me, Jay Felder, and produced at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Please rate and review us. Wherever you listen. You can find more information about the Nonviolent Action Lab and links to our work in the show notes below. See you next time.