Over the next week, a carload of independent journalists will be winding their way through the South, perhaps one of the only caravans of media-makers not pounding the worn campaign trail. Are they on a beat? You could say that.

Six journalists from different regions across the country and varying media backgrounds have embarked on the first Grassroots Media Justice Tour, billed as an “exciting movement-building opportunity.” Kicking off last week in North Carolina, the tour is making pit stops in thirteen cities and towns, ending Oct. 22 in Denton, Texas.

Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn, said the tour was designed as an organizing project to highlight the intersection of journalism and grassroots activism through workshops and performances.

“We need to look at all the different ways we can reach each other,” he said. “For the print publications on this tour, they’re at conferences and on the Internet, but that’s not the way to meet people. A lot of people aren’t at conferences. Maybe they don’t have bookstores near them. They’re not on various e-mail networks. To be able to directly reach people is another way to do it.”

The tour is sponsored by Left Turn, ColorLines, Bitch, $pread, Free Speech Radio News, make/shift, and other radical and independent media projects from around the United States. Flaherty is joined on the tour by media makers Hadassah Hill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Puck Lo, Jen Angel, and Jesse Muhammad.One of the primary functions of the tour is to “get information out” about social justice struggles. In the face of massive media consolidation, where diverse and independent voices are stifled, Flaherty said reaching people requires creativity.

“It’s really challenging to get voices out in this monopoly marketplace with Fox owning MySpace and Google owning YouTube,” he said. “They’re branching out to these new media areas. As technology changes, corporations are very dynamically adept at changing. The forms for getting our voices out – technology opens up new forms – but then corporate control keeps closing up those forms. So we have to be really dynamic and adaptive to deal with that.”

The second goal of the tour is to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media – a connection that Flaherty said was vital in telling the story of the Jena 6 case when the mainstream media was mum.

And as independent media struggle with postal rate hikes, increased publishing costs, and an Internet landscape that doesn’t encourage people to pay for content, the question of how to get people to fund quality journalism is present on the tour.

“We are talking to people about really valuing media,” Flaherty said. “I think all of our movements are in crisis. And I think this nonprofit industrial complex is part of it. We’ve really sort of forgotten how to fund our own movements and not really relying on grants and others sorts of funding. We’re seeing that grants can be really unreliable. Funding can drop out at a moment’s notice – it can be unsustainable, it can be unpredictable.”

Yet in a time of crisis for both journalism and the country, Flaherty said the tour is offering some inspiration. “It’s great to be out here and connecting with people to see the different work people are doing,” he said.

Flaherty said the tour could be even more impactful if it had wider funding and support.  “We’re very grassroots and just scraping by,” he said.

To find out more about the tour or to make a donation, contact Jordan Flaherty at neworleans@leftturn.org .