A coalition of concerned citizens, labor organizations, advocacy groups and OccupyLA protesters will demonstrate outside News Corporation’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Friday, Oct. 21.

While we come from different backgrounds and interests we are joining together in Los Angeles because we believe that no single company should be allowed to own an overwhelming share of the media in our country.

These are our grievances against News Corp.:

Last week Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of UNIX, died — and hardly anyone covered it. Ritchie lived quietly — he wasn't the showman that Steve Jobs was — and apparently he died quietly, too. While working at Bell Labs in the late ‘60s Ritchie wrote the C programming language with Brian Kernighan. 

Last week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on a troubling trend that has many of the most innovative new journalism nonprofits stuck in a bureaucratic black hole at the IRS.

The rise of local nonprofit news organizations has been heralded as one of the most promising signs in the news industry’s rapid transformation over the last four years. Veteran reporters, tech-savvy journalists and citizens are starting vibrant local journalism nonprofits to fill the gaps commercial media are leaving behind as they consolidate and slash newsroom jobs.

In its relentless effort to take over competitor T-Mobile, AT&T has been dangling the promise of better service and greater access to broadband Internet to rural Americans as an incentive for policymakers to support and approve the $39 billion deal. But in eastern Kentucky, activists for rural broadband aren’t holding their breath and waiting for AT&T to make good on this promise.