How they organized protests before Twitter (updated).

The media used by protest movements in Hungary 1956, East Timor 1970s/80s, Iran 1979, China 1989, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia 1989. GlobalPost, 19 June 2009.
     Update: "The international media acted the same way 30 years ago. Back then, technology was not so advanced. There was no YouTube, no internet or satellite television. But people still depended on international media for news. Then, it was the age of short wave radios. People depended on the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Israel and Radio Moscow for information and analysis." Azar Majedi, Scoop (New Zealand), 26 June 2009.
     "Recall during the Tiananmen protests in 1989 the exchanges of faxes between the Chinese students in Beijing and expatriate Chinese students in universities around the world. Those outside China faxed the students in Beijing daily summaries of Western news accounts; those in Beijing faxed out first-person accounts of what was happening on the ground. Or remember in 1996 when the Milosevic regime shut down the alternative Serbian radio station Radio B92, its programming stayed on-air because the BBC and Voice of America rebroadcast B92 Real Audio files downloaded via the Net. And before either of those there was Vietnam. In the early days of the war during the Kennedy administration, before the foreign press operated under the rules of the US forces, journalists could send their copy and photographs out of the country via the radio transmitter at the Saigon Post, telephone, and telegraph office, but they had to pass the South Vietnamese censors first." Susan Moeller, Huffington Post, 19 June 2009. Posted: 27 Jun 2009 Permalink Print