Fourth Annual Grassroots Media Conference -- February 24, 2007, New School University, NYC. Grassroots Media and Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards Development -- Lumi Michelle Rolley, No Land Grab Blog; Norman Oder, Atlantic Yards Report Blog; Candace Carponter, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn; and Stuart Schrader, Picketing Henry Ford Blog. This panel addressed the grassroots-media response to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Though the response was not coordinated and arose organically, it can serve as a model for other communities and struggles facing a well-funded, sophisticated media machine. The project’s developer had access to many mainstream media, the opposition’s responses to it coalesced around websites, blogs, and message boards. This panel reveals the paradox of corporate message hypermanagement: although corporations and governments attempt to control every aspect of their public presentation in all media forms, the proliferation of media allow concerned citizens access to unavailable information, shedding light on the inconsistencies, distortions, and failures, as well as the strategy, of the message control. In the case of the Atlantic Yards project, an overarching message encouraged by the developer was race- and class-based divisiveness, and this panel will show how grassroots media can overcome divisiveness through rigorous analysis of such tactics.
![[help]](/images/question.gif "[help]")
)![[Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]](http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif "[Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]")