Portland Occupier

I don't believe in objectivity, but I believe in genuineness. Occupy talks in a genuine way.
--Adam Rothstein.

Adam Rothstein calls himself the Point-of-Contact for Portland Occupier,  the news website of Occupy Portland to which I've been contributing since October, 2011. Anywhere other than Occupy, he'd be called the Editor in Chief, but in the Occupy movement, that title is a vestige of the old hierarchical way of doing things. Adam rides a bike to his unpaid job with Occupy Portland and deals with Occupier emails daily, reads news from hundreds of sites, funnels photographers' and writers' submissions through an editorial team, keeps up with twitter and other social media sites, solicits news from volunteer writers, and holds office hours with other media types in a room about fiifteen feet square, currently rented for $250 a month as a home for the media arm of Occupy Portland. He also writes.

He and his wife moved from New York to Portland in 2007 "for the weather," he grins, and because "it's a cool city with a progressive vibe and good public transportation. It's more affordable than New York, there's art, there are plenty of young people with ideas, there's environmental consciousness, and something we didn't know till we got here--a great public library."  It's also a city where jobs are scarce. His wife worked at a women's shelter till she got a job with the city, and he depends on freelance writing and journalism to bring home some grocery money.

Adam writes Occupy news as well as in-depth analysis, such as this article on Transparency vs. Security. In his analytical articles his education shows: he has a BA from Grinnell and a Master's in Philosophy from the New School of Social Research in New York. Whenever there's an Occupy action he runs a "Live Blog" on the front line by setting up a lawn chair behind a card table for his laptop and various routers and whatnot in a battered mini-van belonging to another Occupier, jokingly called the "media van." He wants to see Portland Occupier become "a trusted name for news, not just locally but nationally, internationally. I want us to keep shifting the narrative, because now a lot of people are open to community media, willing to read that alongside or instead of corporate media." What he needs is more volunteers--not just in Portland but anywhere in the world, who can report on ways people are toppling power structures that don't serve them and using their ingenuity to create sustainable ways to live, work, and take care of the planet and each other.

"We can never block out the Rush Limbaughs of the world," he says, "but we can make our voices more relevant and increase the number of people hearing and responding to our voices, being part of the narrative of truth." I told him I would be Blipping this, and he welcomes articles from Blippers around the planet: just send them to portland.occupier@gmail.com

This story is part of a series of stories I'm writing about people involved in Occupy Portland. An earlier story on Illona Trogub appeared here.