POZ, an indispensable magazine of “life, health, & HIV,” turns 15 this year—and to mark its anniversary, the publication is donating all advertising revenue from its forthcoming May issue to the Denver Principles Project, a new initiative from the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA) that seeks to dramatically increase the group’s membership and, as it follows, political and social clout.

In its March issue, POZ asks people to (re)commit to the cause:

The last eight years have seen a dramatic reversal of what our movement accomplished in the early years:

• Science-based HIV prevention programs have been gutted in favor of abstinence-only or abstinence-until-marriage programs. The result? Hundreds of thousands of new HIV infections, mostly among young people of color.
• Hysteria-driven prosecution of people with HIV for failing to disclose their status has helped create an image of so-called “AIDS Monsters” in the media and further fueled the criminalization—and stigmatization—of people with HIV. The result? We are increasingly marginalized and portrayed as vectors of disease who must be controlled and regulated rather than as what we are: human beings struggling with a life-threatening disease who deserve compassion, human rights and adequate, affordable health care.
• While the United States has technically lifted the specific ban on HIV-positive people from entering the country, HIV remains on the list of contagious diseases that can be used to prohibit people with HIV from immigrating to or visiting America. The result? The nation that represents itself as a beacon of freedom is, instead, a leader in discrimination, setting a shameful example of intolerance and ignorance.

Now, it is time for all people who want to end the AIDS epidemic to recommit to the spirit of The Denver Principles—thus ensuring that the voices of people with HIV are heard.

In addition to donating May’s ad revenue, POZ also will republish the original Denver Principles manifesto, which, drafted in 1983, articulated the foundation of the self-empowerment movement for people with HIV/AIDS. To get involved in the Denver Principles Project, visit NAPWA online.

More to read/love: POZ is an Utne Independent Press Award winner for health/wellness coverage. Its editor in chief Regan Hofmann recently guest blogged for our daily best-of-the-web extravaganza, Alt Wire.

Source: POZ

The new issue of the Weekly Standard arrived in the mail today. Here are some alternative headlines they could have used:

Tough Times in Stereotypesville
Culturally Insensitive Times in Conservatopia
Shrillride in Wingnut City
Schadenfreude in Weekly Standarstown
Rollercoaster to Racism

Source: Weekly Standard 

While the troubled economy takes its toll on community radio across the country, at least one radio program continues to thrive. Shelley Bluejay Pierce reports for Native American Times that Native American Radio Live (NARL) hosted by Albert Raymond Cata is going strong. NARL broadcasts out of Santa Fe Public Radio, KSFR, and has served its diverse community for 17 years.

Sixty-four year-old Cata, a master storyteller from Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan Pueblo), New Mexico, started his radio career in 1986 after retiring from the U.S. Air Force.

“All I know about broadcasting I learned as I went,” he says. “I was interested in people and like the music and wanted to share with others about who the Native American person is within the fabric of general society.”

His advice to other radio programmers in this economy?

“You have to keep on top of your community needs. You need programs that address what interests the listeners and that include everything from music, politics, sports, school events, community fund drives and even gardening...The trouble I see for many community radio shows is that they don’t have a true ‘format’ and are not focused on the needs of their communities.”

Check out how Cata meets those needs on NARL’s website, which features interviews with prominent Native American politicians, artists and storytellers, including actor Adam Beach, known for his stirring performances in Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie, and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

Or, listen to Native American Radio Live streaming every Saturday from 3:00-5:00 Mountain Daylight Time.

Source: Native American Times

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is writer and media activist Jen Angel . Five amazing activist organizations you've probably never heard of (but should check out right now):

Reclaim the Media: A small Seattle-based non-profit, Reclaim the Media is one of the best sites for news on media policy issues and activism.

SmartMeme: For the last five years, SmartMeme has been developing story-based strategy—understanding how narratives and stories work to aid campaigns and social movements.

Courage to Resist: Courage to Resist supports members of our military who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military opposition to the war in Vietnam was a critical element in the anti-war movement, and it can be again.

Rising Tide North America: An up-and-coming environmental activist group, known for their creative direct actions and no-compromise stance opposing fossil fuel use.

The Beehive Collective: This group of talented artist-activists useintricately detailed murals as vehicles to educate the public about the history and implications of complex political, economic and social issues, from Pan Pueblo Panama to mountain-top removal coal mining.

BIO: Jen Angel is a writer and media activist, currently helping others promote their work through the cooperative publicity and tour management group, Aid & Abet. She is the former publisher of Clamor Magazine and a founding board member of Allied Media Projects. She blogs at http://jenangel.wordpress.com.

Previous Alt Wire Guests: Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam, Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan, Fatemeh Fakhraie, Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore

Many of the most recognizable, creative, inane, offensive, and juvenile ads today come from one advertising agency: Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. In the latest issue of Creative Review, Eliza Williams looks at what makes the agency so widely popular and intensely reviled at the same time. Here are a few of their recent ad campaigns:

-- Innovative: Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application, written about on this website.
-- Sophomoric: Whopper Freakout Ads, where surly Burger King customers, deprived of Whoppers, threaten employees on hidden cameras.
-- Funny: Hulu’s ads starring Alec Baldwin.
-- Confusing: The Microsoft ads starring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
-- Culturally insensitive (and borderline imperialistic): Whopper Virgins ads, which feature taste tests given to people supposedly untouched by fast food advertising.

The company’s mastery of digital advertising began back in 2004 with the Subservient Chicken website, a collaboration with the Barbarian Group marketing firm. Now the CP + B “has been heralded by many as representing a model for the ad agency of the future,” according to Creative Review. The root of their success may lie in the offense people seem to take at their advertising. Williams writes, “Its work may not be pretty, and it may at times centre on a certain style of frat boy humour, but it will always get our attention and get us talking.”

Concerned taxpayers might wonder how and where our money is being dispersed via the Obama stimulus package, especially considering that the Bush stimulus of last year seems to have evaporated into the ether with no accountability. Investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica tracks the stimulus evolution in detail, focusing on Obama’s transparency pledge. 

In a recent report, Michael Grabell explores the myriad challenges facing Obama's promise, including who gets to spend the money and how it gets monitored. As an example, Grabell examines the ill-fated Xanadu project in New Jersey, a multi-million dollar entertainment complex that has been mired in delays due to increased costs and allegations of corruption. The same regional authority in charge of Xanadu will oversee another “shovel-ready” project under the Obama stimulus—a $9 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Can the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (“RAT” as some call it) prevent another debacle like Xanadu?

As money flows through the states, some of it will go to local and regional organizations that operate with little oversight. Additionally, the stimulus plan’s wide reach, which touches everything from public housing to space exploration, invites a certain amount of abuse as its sheer size increases opportunities for corruption.

ProPublica and its partner ShovelWatch will be an ongoing source for following stimulus spending. Its web space includes a regularly updated chart that tracks individual state transparency websites and a projects list released by state and federal agencies.

Source: ProPublica 

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Jessica Valenti of Feministing . We asked her for five links, and here's what she gave us (check back for Monday's guest, media activist Joshua Breitbart ): 

My Flickr Favorites: I have a bit of a thing for feminist graffiti and street activism/art.

Interview with bell hooks:  What can I really say—this woman is just incredible. I could watch this interview over and over...I've also assigned it in a Gender & Pop Culture class that I teach at Rutgers. hooks has this incredible talent for making complicated ideas accessible, which is really powerful.

The Virgin:  I've been thinking a lot about virginity lately (not a surprise given my new book, I suppose!) and I came across this Gustav Klimt painting; I'm not sure how I feel about it yet but I keep looking at it...

My fake wedding website: My partner and I just thought that buying the url would be hilarious.  It still makes me laugh whenever I look at it.

Whipping Girl: One of my favorites, and—in my opinion—one of the most important feminist books to come out in years.  The author, Julia Serano, is just brilliant and writes about gender, trans women and femininity in a way that not only educates, but inspires.  I wish everyone would read this.

Bio: Jessica Valenti is a feminist author and founder of the blog and online community Feministing.com.  Her newest book, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Yong Women , has just been released.

Previous Alt Wire Guests: Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel , Anne Elizabeth Moore 

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Superhero Anonymous," from Westword

- Kai Wright on race and finger-pointing in the wake of Prop. 8, from ColorLines

- Geez experiments with the barter system 

- Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! tackles transit

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. We asked today's guest, Shakesville blogger Melissa McEwan, for five great links. Here's what happened (check back for Monday's guest, Paddy Johnson of Artfagcity):

Five links, they tell me. They asked me because they know I am a wicked, insurrectionary, feminist malcontent, and so they should not be surprised that my first order of business is breaking the rules. These are my seven deadly sins of the internets:

Lust—Glasvegas, my current unquenchable music crush, whose "Go Square Go" puts me in a Scottish pub during a footie match so certainly I check my shoetops for spilt ale.

Gluttony—Feminist Literature, a compilation of the full texts of feminist literature available online, a virtual pâtisserie of delectables begging me to devour them whole and savor indulgently every nourishing morsel.

Greed—Fluevog, shoes in which to rule the world; my altar, my church, my Mecca, at which one day I will make these mine.

Sloth—The Chicago Museums, which, combined, can create a timesuck of link-adventuring so cavernous it is rivaled only by the devilry of YouTube's related videos lists.

Wrath—Care.org, an international humanitarian organization fighting poverty while centralizing women's issues, more accurately described as the antidote to my wrath, a catharsis, the means by which my anger is translated into action.

Envy—Rachel, whose recaps of my favorite show, "Lost," make me laugh until I am gasping for air and are one of the very few things on the internet that ever make me think, "I wish I'd written that…"

Pride—Comment is free, the Guardian's blog collective, the grand ambitiousness of which is rivaled only by its capacity to deliver, and I am proud to be a (very) small part.

BIO: Melissa McEwan is the founder and editor of the cultural blog Shakesville, which was highlighted in the Utne Reader's survey of the feminist blogosphere.  McEwan also contributes to Comment is free America and AlterNet, and lives just outside Chicago with three cats and a Scotsman.

Previous Alt Wire Guests:  Fatemeh Fakhraie ,  Joe Biel ,  Anne Elizabeth Moore  

With the media in freefall, newspapers are fighting to survive and journalism schools are struggling to stay relevant. The Anniston Star newspaper and the University of Alabama have found a partnership that could help both. Using a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Anniston Star has started accepting master’s students for a community journalism program to pitch and report stories and supplement the newspaper’s editorial coverage.

The move was met with some resistance from the paper’s editorial staff. Troy Turner, who was the executive editor of the Star before the program began, told the American Journalism Review, “They wanted a training model like a Navy hospital ship. But we worked like a battleship, with all guns blazing. We wanted to continue doing the solid journalism that the Anniston Star had long been known for doing.” Now that the program has started, however, Turner admits that the it’s having some success.

Other journalism schools haven’t had as easy of a time adjusting. When the New York Times partnered with the City University of New York for their own community journalism project, “The Local,” New York Magazine reports that the move was seen as a slight to the University of Columbia venerable journalism school.

Since then Columbia has increased its efforts to stay current. According to New York Magazine, the school will soon offer “a revamped, digitally focused curriculum designed to make all students as capable of creating an interactive graphic as they are of pounding out 600 words on a community-board meeting.” But just as many old-school journalists don’t want to dive into blogging, professors at Columbia are less than enthusiastic about going digital. Ari Goldman, a 16-year professor of Columbia’s Reporting and Writing 1 (RW1) class, is quoted as saying “fuck new media,” describing the move to digital as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

Image by Bluemarine, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Source: American Journalism Review, New York Magazine 

The internet poo-bahs at Technorati say that blog authority is dropping. The most popular blogs on the internet have seen their “authority” scores, based on the number of other blogs linking to them, go down recently, even if their ranks relative to the rest of the internet remain the same.

This loss of blog authority doesn’t point to a loss of importance, Brian Solis writes for TechCrunch. It shows that the way people consume media has changed. Instead of writing competing blog posts, people are increasingly turning to Twitter or Facebook to respond and make their voices heard.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

Now people need to figure out new ways to measure the importance of blogs, taking social networking and non-traditional derivative content into consideration. Solis writes, “Now, we have the ability to instantly interact with, respond, or promote blog content away from the source blog, but that shouldn’t make the original post any less valuable.”

Source: TechCrunch 

The most iconic images of the Great Depression passed through Dorothea Lange's camera. These days you can't help but see the ghosts of Lange's portraits in photos and video footage from the darkest corners of the current economic crisis. Clinical Psychologist and blogger Michael Shaw makes a dreadfully direct link, blogging at the always compelling BAGnewsNotes about a series of tent city photos taken in Sacramento, California, the same city where Lange took photos like these:

Compare those shots to this photograph of Karen Hersh, an out of work truck driver, cleaning her Sacramento tent city home several decades later.

The online magazine Slate has invited readers to submit photographs from the economic crisis to its Flickr page, and Lange is there too. A standout of the submissions so far is this photograph of a tent pitched on a blighted corner of Portland, Oregon.

In Slate's call for photographs, they lay out the challenge of photographing this new depression: "You can't take a photograph of a collateralized debt obligation."

Sources: BAGnewsNotes, Slate, Library of Congress 

Images by Dorothea Lange

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week.

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Adultery and Other Half Revolutions," from Briarpatch

- A two-mom family discovers the joy of half-siblings, and Noemi Martinez embraces the notion that activism begins at home, from Hip Mama (not available online)

- New Internationalist on the continuing scourge of maternal deaths

- The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report on "The Year in Hate"

Sources: Briarpatch, Hip Mama, New Internationalist, Intelligence Report

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Joe Biel of  Microcosm Publishing. Check back for tomorrow's guest: Fatemeh Fakhraie of Muslimah Media Watch. 

The Prelinger Archives: I experience nothing but awe and wonder when I comb Prelinger Internet Archive. Whether I'm looking for open-source or copyright-expired video to sample or a hilariously outdated instructional film to watch, this is the place.

Punks and Vegetable Oil: Few things inspire me more than da punx taking their approach to things beyond music. Fossil Free Fuel is a brilliant example of exactly what I think of when I extrapolate the ideals that I had in my youth. It blows my mind that the best source for waste vegetable oil diesel system parts and conversion kits would be these knowledgeable punks.

Dicentra Collective: Portland kind of has everything. Dicentra Collective does is a resource for people who need all kinds of emotional support, sexual assualt resources, zines about physical disabilities, or a seemingly catch-all community directory of related projects. They put on frequent discussion events about all manner of the most uncomfortable topics you can imagine. Amazing.

Edwin's Instructables: My friend Edwin has at least 365 project ideas each year so there's been talk of putting together his "Idea-A-Day" calendar. In the meantime, and in tribute to Edwin, you can check out Instructables, where you can learn to make and do all manner of cool things.

Politically Unsophisticated and Pretty Neat: Even as I get older there is a part of me that respects what Plan-it X Records does. It's a pretty simple concept: all full-length CDs are $5 and all people involved are interested in building community together; releasing music with people that you get along with as human beings, not just as a business relationship. You can call it "politically unsophisticated" but shit, that's a pretty neat thing.

We Make Zines: There have been numerous attempts to create an active online zine community for as long as there's been a graphical internet but Krissy Durden's We Make Zines is the most successful in a long time. Daily updates on threads and plenty of international folks sharing information and most importantly zines!

Zinewiki: If I had enough time in the day to be obsessive, I would compulsively update entries on Zinewiki, the Wikipedia solely about zines and their makers. What started a few years back as a way to create a Wikipedia page about Alex Wrekk (deemed "non-notable" on standard Wikipedia) became a gigantic girth of information.

If it's a blog, it's the only one that I read: I met Jonathan Maus when he organized a bike craft swap meet back in 2005. He was smiley, energetic, and friendly. I like that. Within no time he had taken his bike enthusiasm to the nth degree with Bike Portland, charting virtually everything cycle-related in our Rose City. Then he added Elly Blue, who gives him a real run for his money in all of the aforementioned departments. If it's a blog, it's the only one that I read.
 
Honestly, Gmail: This is going to seem like irony or sarcasm, but honestly Gmail is the only website I look at on 90% of the days I use the internet. On a purely literal level, all of my most inspirational offerings come via Gmail: new opportunities, writing gigs, people who want to play my talkies at their school, and people who ask questions and share information that I might be interested in. Most days, I could really do without the rest of the internet and the way that it changed how information is broadcast.

BIO: Joe Biel isn't as grumpy or bitter as he used to be and no longer feels the need to tell journalists why he thinks their paper is crappy. He founded Microcosm Publishing in 1996 and is working on getting Cantankorous Titles, a new DVD label off the ground this year. He has made a number of short and feature length talkies, including the forthcoming feature "If It Ain't Cheap, It Ain't Punk: Fourteen Years of Plan-it X Records," and is the author of Make a Zine: When Words & Graphics Collide and is midway through his next book for Garrett County Press about folks who have grown up with punk and applied the ethics, approach, and ideals to things other than music.

Previous Alt Wire guest:  Anne Elizabeth Moore  

Image by Microcosm

Am I the only one who’s been amused by the Wall Street Journal’s hyperbolic headlines in the Obama era? Every few days it seems there’s a “most read” opinion-page article topped by a headline that should have been published during the Bush administration—but never was. Here are my recent laugh-out-loud favorites:

“The President Politicizes Stem-Cell Research” (today). Bush of course was the guy who turned this issue into a red-meat feed for the conservative base. To suggest that Obama is suddenly politicizing it by reversing Bush’s science-challenged research ban is not just blind to the obvious but comically absurd.

“ Is the Administration Winging It? ” (February 18). Whooee, what a gem. The title of this opinion piece could have applied to the entire Dubya reign, whose hallmark was recklessness, ignorance, and incompetence, from an unnecessary and abysmally planned war to the hapless “heck of a job, Brownie” Hurricane Katrina response. What’s even better is the byline on this one: Karl Rove. Stop it, my sides hurt.

“ Presidential Bait-and-Switch ” (March 5). The premise here, also a Rove construction, is that Americans voted for a leader who, as soon as he was in office, changed his tune—and that this occurred in the 2008 election, not 2000 or 2004. Remember the phrase “I’m a uniter, not a divider”? How about “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders”? Bush was a serial bait-and-switcher, whereas Obama so far is basically carrying out the sort of change he promised, as one Journal reader pointed out in response.

Veteran photojournalist Bruce Haley has seen the worst of us. He's covered conflicts stretching back to the Afghan battle against the Soviet Union. Ten years ago, he wrote something he called The Tao of War Photography. It's part training manual and part memoir. It's mostly tragic and it's a little bit hilarious. Here are some highlights and a few of Haley's photographs (or read The Tao of War Photography in its entirety):

Photo: National Liberation Army guerrilla fighter; Burma

"To begin with, practice this sentence: 'If I get out of here alive, I’ll never do this again.'

"...The editors of the major magazines really don’t give a rat’s ass about the latest war and famine in the hinterlands of East BurkinaTimorLanka. You’ll never get an assignment to cover this unless Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a rebel commander and Tommy Hilfiger designs his battle fatigues.

"...Absent Leo and Tommy, a few murdered white tourists will cause a temporary blip on the radar screen. Or not.

"...It is said that sudden fright causes people to soil themselves. I have noticed that sustained fright causes increased flatulence: fear-farting. I have also seen Afghan mujahideen run out into a heavy rain of incoming artillery rather than shelter in a small crevice with two fear-farting Western journalists.

Photo: Terrified women shelter in a ditch, after being caught out in the open during an artillery barrage; Croatia

"...Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question.

"...On the flipside of #11: many of the people who have actually suffered through such hardships show the greatest faith I’ve ever encountered on the planet. Go figure.

Photo: Guerrilla fighters near the Andaman Sea; Burma

"...Equation: the number of journalists covering any given conflict is directly proportional to the proximity of comfortable lodging and booze.

"...Always keep in mind the following when you photograph people in war zones and other awful places: You’re there because you want to be—they aren’t and you can leave—they can’t."

For more of Haley's fantastic photos, which extend well beyond war zones, visit his BruceHaleyPictures.com.

Images by Bruce Haley.

Most media outlets have hit already the panic button. Print, radio, and online publications are struggling to survive. TV, on the other hand, is still riding high. The Project for Excellence in Journalism identifies local TV as “one of the few sources of news that continues to be popular.” And TV viewership is currently at an all-time high, according to Nielsen, with Americans watching more than 151 hours of TV per month.

In spite of their huge reach, Michael Schaffer writes for the New Republic of a “fiery economic crash” for the local TV news anchors. The current recession may be helping the local anchors get famous in the short term, because television stations are running more promos for their anchors as they struggle to find advertisers. Long term, however, Schaffer writes that TV news will likely suffer the same gradual obsolecessence that other legacy news outlets are currently experiencing. The celebrity status held by the news anchors is simply making their fate creep a bit more slowly.

Maybe they could stave off their fate a bit longer if people saw a little more of this:

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week. Utne's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, journals,weeklies, zines, and other dispatches from the independent press.

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Why we make art," from Greater Good 

- The Progressive on toxic computer-recycling programs at federal prisons (not yet available online)

- Dambisa Moyo, outspoken critic of aid to Africa, in the conservative British magazine Standpoint 

- Pretty birds in Botswana, courtesy of Living Bird (not yet available online)

Sources: Greater Good, The Progressive, Standpoint, Living Bird

Bloggers and bookstores are often kindred spirits, but many bloggers link to the Amazon page for books they discuss in their posts. IndieBound recently added a book-linking feature that provides a user-friendly alternative: bloggers can link to book information and cover art on IndieBound, and users who follow the link and want to purchase the book can enter their zip code to find it at a local store. 

The bookseller/blogger Bookavore is on a mission to rally her fellow bloggers in support of independent bookstores. "I’d like to encourage as many people as possible to, when using a link that is about a book, link to IndieBound," she writes in a recent post. "I’m not asking anyone to stop linking anywhere, just to start linking to IndieBound as well (although, of course, I won’t stop anybody who decides to exclusively link to IndieBound; in fact, I might kiss them)."

Sources: Bookavore, IndieBound