I just set up a new email listserv for fellow alums of Florida A&M's School of Journalism & Graphic Communication.
Two easy ways to join:
- Email sjgcrattlers-request[at]freelists[dot]org with 'subscribe' in the subject field. Or...
- Visit the listserv homepage to sign up via your browser.
Once you're subscribed, you will receive group messages and be able to post to the group by emailing sjgcrattlers[at]freelists[dot]org
"Future alumni" and other friends of the program are welcome to join as well, if it's of interest. This is an unofficial group, not sponsored by the university, so I'm glad to keep participation pretty ad-hoc.
J-schoolers of a certain vintage (ahem) may recall we did something like this back in the early '00s, hosted on Yahoo. At the time, as social sites like MySpace and Facebook began to grow, the listserv fizzled. Eventually, we shut it down.
I'm bringing the group back now (and for good) because I think the pendulum is truly swinging back the other way for online communities in general.
We're all becoming more mistrustful of proprietary social platforms these days, for good reason. They violate user privacy wantonly, engage in questionable politics, enable hate speech, screw over news organizations, and on and on. Hence we need tools to build community that are open source and not reliant on Big Tech.
That's what email listservs are. Yes, they are old school. But they work, and the open development model ultimately gives communities more freedom in many ways.
Email itself is an open standard, of course, and the underlying software that runs freelists.org, manages its databases, and so on is open as well. That gives us flexibility and portability we didn't even have back in the Yahoo days.
I strongly believe we all need to start paying closer attention to these details regarding the tech we use, especially if you care about free press or HBCUs or both.
I know we've already got SJGC groups over on corporate platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, of course. That's all fine. But I do hope you'll join me over on our new listserv as well. 😊