Narco News to Hold 8th Anniversary Celebration in Seattle, Friday, April 25

The 6 p.m. Event at Waid’s Haitian Lounge Features J-School Graduates and More

By Al Giordano
Publisher and Founder, Narco News

April 18, 2008

Today marks eight years since I posted a little website on the Internet – www.narconews.com – to publish my reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America. The project quickly grew and grew and now includes more than 100 graduates of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, 326 co-publishers, and hundreds of thousands of readers around the world in seven languages.

Just think: We’ve now been online longer than George Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower had been presidents of the United States.

We began publishing just as the bubble had burst on the “dot-com boom,” when hundreds of commercial online newspapers and magazines went out of business. Our mission was different: not to make a profit, but to break the information blockade by commercial media that ignore or distort the news across international borders in our América.

We built it, and they came. Our reporting on drug war corruption got us sued in our first year by the National Bank of Mexico (Banamex, now part of Citibank). The readers jumped to support our defense fund, we went to the New York Supreme Court, and won the first-ever precedent-setting decision that extends First Amendment protections to Internet journalists everywhere.

We’ve investigated and blown the whistle on corrupt government agencies, officials, money launderers, simulator journalists with conflicts-of-interest, an attempted coup in Venezuela, a US military intervention in Colombia, and the rampant corruption among US law enforcement agencies along the United States-Mexico border.

And in doing so we’ve walked side by side with the indigenous and social movements from Chiapas, Oaxaca and 32 Mexican states to the coca growers of Bolivia to the harm reduction movements of Brazil to the pro-democracy movements across the hemisphere.

And through the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism we’ve trained a new generation of honest and talented journalists of conscience.

This year, we’ll be holding our anniversary celebration in the Pacific Northwestern city of Seattle, Washington. And even if you don’t live or work nearby, you’re invited to participate by being a sponsor of the event:

Narco News 8th Anniversary Celebration

Friday, April 25
6 p.m.
Waid’s Haitian Lounge
http://waidsplace.com/wp/
1212 E. Jefferson Street
(Near The Seattle University, between 12th & 13th streets)
Seattle, Washington

Special Guests:

• Ron Smith, documentary filmmaker, professor, Narco News School of Authentic Journalism
• Amber Howard, graduate, Narco News School of Authentic Journalism
• Laura Carlsen, director, Americas Project
• Al Giordano, publisher, Narco News

Make your reservation now, online, via The Fund for Authentic Journalism, a 501c3 tax exempt corporation that supports our work:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org/

Admission $10

Students $5

Sponsors $50 or more

Sponsors will be listed on Narco News and on the event program.

If you have friends and family in Seattle, you can purchase tickets for them (just send me an email at narconews@gmail.com so we can make sure to put them on the list).

Your contribution also entitles you to a free account on The Narcosphere, to comment on Narco News story and post notebook entries of your own. (Stay tuned: On our birthday, we also give presents, and the new Narcosphere design and features will be unveiled before next Friday’s event.)

Whether you can be there in person or not, we hope you will join in the celebration and help keep this vital work of authentic journalism going even longer.

Please join in the celebration via The Fund’s website:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org/

Or by sending a check to “The Fund for Authentic Journalism” at:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

Thanks for your eight years of readership and support. We’ll keep doing our job as long as you think it needs to be done.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Founder, Narco News
narconews@gmail.com
http://www.narconews.com/

For more Narco News, click here.