is a writer and editor with the Toronto Media Co-op.
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I joined the co-op during the G20 protests in Toronto, I’d been involved in the planning for the Environmental Justice day of action on the Wednesday prior to the weekend and knew a lot of activists in the city and what was going on but didn’t have a specific role to play in the protests. A bunch of my friends I knew from activism were involved in the TMC and I kind of decided on Wednesday night that I’d try being a journalist that weekend, and I haven’t stopped since. And it was amazing, this garage kind of area where we had the newsroom was kind of a like a dream for me, we were covering events all over the city, we were publishing a broadsheet, we were reporting on police brutality and human rights violations and why people were protesting. People from the mainstream media were calling us to find out what was going on, we were breaking stories and keeping track real time of the situation through phone calls and texting and and the internet. At the same time we were taking huge risks, I leant my bike to a friend of mine and him and 3 other AMC journalists got arrested and the bike got stolen, friends houses were being raided, people were being beaten, everyone was being surveilled and searched, all in my own city. One of my first stories was when I went to a press conference regarding house raids and the guy who was supposed to speak at it had been dragged out of a cab by plainclothes cops on the way there. It was kind of a baptism by fire situation.
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Comments posted by Megan Kinch