Biting into the rising media pie

In a world where the vast majority of media is owned by a handful of corporations, Pop and Politics gives young writers and people of color a piece of the media pie. Pop and Politics is committed to aggressive truth-telling, to debating new ideas, and to educating and empowering younger Americans to fully participate in civil society.

* Pop and Politics provides a forum for discussion and debate among young people about current politics and culture.

* Pop and Politics trains next-generation journalists to produce mutli-media content and to use new media to distribute news and information in the public interest.

* And Pop and Politics introduces young people across the United States and around the world to organizations, movements, schools of thought that seek to widen inclusion in the public sphere and create a more truly democratic future.

Journalist Farai Chideya started Pop and Politics as a blog in 1996 while working as an “X-Generation” campaign reporter for CNN. She posted material at the site that spoke to a younger multicultural audience, material that wasn’t making it on to CNN. You can read more about Farai’s motivation to start Pop and Politics and the growth of the mission of the project in her Editorial Note.

An antidote to mainstream political and cultural reporting, Pop and Politics continues to offer informed cultural criticism and straight-up, non-partisan information on where America and the world are headed. Pop and Politics stands strong on First Amendment rights and encourages their expression in all forms.

Training new journalists for the new-media landscape

Pop and Politics is committed to helping young people draw on their relationship with contemporary information culture to produce a new kind of journalism, one that promotes multi-cultural and multi-genre approaches to storytelling, that stresses authenticity as much as objectivity and that encourages authors, audiences and author-audiences toward civic engagement. Read more about our philosophy of new-media journalism in our P+P mini-festo, which also details some of the ways we are helping to reshape the news media.

Pop and Politics project staff

Executive Director Kimberly A. Cooper has nearly a decade of corporate and grassroots-community development experience. She worked in the Advertising Sales and Marketing departments for Time Inc. Los Angeles and spent the past several years writing and consulting for community-based and non-profit organizations, promoting the importance of higher education and civic responsibility. Her commitment to youth empowerment spans from the juvenile detention system in L.A. to facilitating workshop discussions nationwide on the politics of race and media. She has given interviews to media outlets including ABC News, People Magazine, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Los Angeles Times. Her manuscript, Swagtime: A Memoir, is currently under review.

Interim Managing Editor Chris Nelson lived in Cairo, Egypt for most of his childhood. (High school graduation at the pyramids, baby!) He’s halfway to a masters degree in journalism at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and has been published at The Huffington Post, Artist Direct, and The Los Feliz Ledger.  He’s a former corporate hack, a DJ by night, and a wordsmith by trade.

Contributing Writer (and former Managing Editor) John Tomasic has written and edited for the academic and literary press, for the United Nations and for business and culture magazines and websites. He has been a ghostwriter, rewriter, copywriter, blogger, but mostly a graduate-school-paper writer.  He now works as an Editor at The Huffington Post’s Off the Bus section.

Columnist Hanna Ingber Win has covered stories in Myanmar, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Africa, Mexico and the United States.  Hanna wrote a weekly column for the Argus at Wesleyan and one for the Myanmar Times in Rangoon. She is a Dean’s Scholar at USC and an intern at KPCC Patt Morrison. She is from New York and has been married for thirteen months.

Staff Writer Deborah Stokol is an L.A. native who double majored in Music and English at Berkeley. She plays the piano, sings, composes music and has just embarked on a two-year journey through the Online Journalism masters program at USC. She grew up on a steady diet of Peter Sellers, Catherine Deneuve, absurdity, tongue in cheek, puns, awkwardness, and John Cleese. Debbie can often be seen trolling for good coffeehouses and fresh pastries.

Campaign Reporter Torey Van Oot got sprayed by the journalism bug when she was five years old. After an encounter with a skunk in the barn of her Vermont home, she was exiled by the kindergarten Mean Girls to schoolyard Siberia: ie, the boy corner, where the favorite game was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Her assigned role? April the reporter. Now a print journalism and political science major at USC, Torey plans to live a fantastic life by adhering to the motto: “Revel in the game and let the chips fall where they may.”

Contributing Writer Adrienne Russell teaches new-media theory in the Digital Media Studies Department at the University of Denver. She was a research fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and a professor at the American University of Paris. She is presently helping to organize 24/7: A DIY Video Summit to be held in Los Angeles in the spring of 2008.

Political Columnist Max Zimbert is a (by)product of Beverly Hills by way of Union College in Schenectady, NY, where he graduated with honors in Political Science and History.  He just wants to work in the Beltway, but don’t tell him it’s not an easy circle to crack.  Max is currently mastering the art of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Webmaster Mark Zurada is a graduate of Duke University with a JD from the University of Miami School of Law. He started making websites as a hobby while still in high school and his enthusiasm for the art has yet to wane. Though he remains busy with his legal and entrepreneurial endeavors, he enjoys lending a helping hand to P+P.

Occasional Bloggers: Michelle Lanz, Matthew Mundy, Mark Naylor, Jean Yung, Shazia Haq, Keli Moore,