Pop and Politics’ 2010 midterm election specials take you into the heart of America at a time of high stakes and high anxiety (download full press release here).
Pop and Politics has a long history. In 1995, then-CNN “Youth Political Analyst” Farai Chideya started the site as a blog with an unconventional take on politics for a younger and more diverse audience. Since then, Pop and Politics has gone through many evolutions, including time as a journalism training program, first at San Francisco State University and then at the University of Southern California.
Today, Farai and the team of journalists at Pop and Politics are working to deliver fresh news and reporting about our times, our trends, our lives, the issues that divide us, and the people who work hard to bring us back together.
We’ll present three hour-long, nationally broadcast radio specials on October 21, 28, and November 4. We’re also holding public events around the country, and of course presenting video and multimedia content online. And we want you to join us on this journey… learn more about how you can participate!
MEET THE STAFF
Host and Managing Editor Farai Chideya has combined media, technology, and social justice during her 20-year career as an award-winning author and journalist. She’s a former host of NPR’s News and Notes. Chideya is the author of non-fiction titles including Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters and Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans. Her first novel, Kiss the Sky, was released in 2009.
Executive Producer Kerry Donahue was part of the team at WNYC that launched The Takeaway in 2008, a national morning news program produced by WNYC and PRI with The New York Times, the BBC World Service, and WGBH Boston. She toughed out the Internet boom/bust as a producer of original content at Audible.com and is a former associate professor in radio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Kerry’s a Mainer who lives in Lower Manhattan, ayuh.
Senior producer Suzie Lechtenberg worked as a producer at Weekend America for almost five years. She’s also worked at Marketplace, Day to Day, and filed a piece about women and hot rods for Studio 360. This past year she was a Ted Scripps journalism fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She’s from Kansas and is currently living in Brooklyn.
Multimedia producer Aaron Ernst was as an Associate Producer on three films for PBS FRONTLINE and a multimedia producer for PBS Wide Angle. He’s a 2008 graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he studied international media and communication. Aaron grew up in central Alaska. He was a Japanese-English translator before transitioning into the media.
Producer Ave Carrillo originally came from the Bay Area where she graduated from UC Berkeley in Fine Arts. Realizing that her true path lay in sound, she moved to New York and got into radio in 1998 with NPR’s Jazz From Lincoln Center, hosted by CBS news correspondent Ed Bradley. Since then she’s delved into production and sound design with Peabody Award winning PRI’s Studio 360, PRI’s Fair Game with Faith Salie, The New Yorker podcast and WNYC’s Music and Web Dept. With radio, she’s explored topics ranging from jazz, fine art, dance, news, politics and prosthetics.
Associate producer Nona Willis Aronowitz most recently co-hosted and produced a feminist news show at Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo.org. She was also a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and has written for other places like Slate and The Nation. Her book, Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism, came out last November. She’s a die-hard New Yorker and Mad Men-obsessed.
Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya was created by Pop and Politics and co- produced with WNYC Radio. American Public Media is the distributor.
The project is funded in part by the Ford Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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