This past Thursday (March 4), I saw a special, one-night-only nationwide screening of “Half the Sky.” The film, based on a staged event at NYU last fall, is in turn based on the book of the same title by NY Times reporters Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn. It featured readings […]

The spontaneous eruption over the new mammography regulations, and the confused history of the debate, warn us about the general relationships between government-issued medical guidelines, insurance coverage limits, and doctors’ discretion. […]

As I sit against the florescence of the television screen, watching the conservative Fox News pundit Glenn Beck drive political nails into progressive leaders using the fear of U.S. blacks and immigrants of color as his hammer, my memory harkens back to the year in which the book Push was set, 1987. During that time, […]

Ellen Goodman is usually thoughtful but in “The $250 donation to elders” (Boston Globe, Oct. 23) she doesn’t understand Social Security. The average woman receives only $896 a month.
She would get an additional $22 a month if Congress actually passes Obama’s proposed bill, intended […]

I found my first job in 1963 by looking through the “jobs for women” section of the classified ads in the local Colorado Springs newspapers. It would take another decade for those gender-segregated ads to disappear, and then only because National Organization for Women had filed its landmark complaint against the now defunct Pittsburgh Press . That case went would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and result in the 1973 ruling saying the practice was illegal.

Saturday morning at the Allied Media Conference, and I’m waking up thinking about how impressive the “future is now” vibe has been at #AMC09. I can honestly say I’ve never been to as tech-savvy a conference, specifically in relation to the use of information communications technology. For example, a major highlight of last night’s keynote […]

I’m attending “Media Justice: What’s Next?” at the Allied Media Conference.
This rich, deep fishbowl conversation has focused on the reasons why media justice activists do our work, and varied methods media justice organizers are acting in the service of transformational social justice and expanding power of traditionally oppressed communities, and creating positive change around […]

Quick hit: Sex Workers and Media at the Allied Media Conference
I’m attending an enlightening discussion about the impact of corporate media coverage of the sex industry on the lives of sex workers — and the reasons why sex workers have created their own media to tell their own stories, on their own terms, to expand […]

If you are attending the Allied Media Conference in Detroit this week, I hope you will join Women In Media & News from 12:15 - 2pm on Friday, July 17, at our session:
Strengthen Women’s Media & You Strengthen the Women’s Movement
Facilitators:
Ariel Dougherty, Women’s Working Group of the USSF;
Jacqui Patterson, Women of Color United;
Sonali Kolhatkar, Uprising […]

Small groups broke out and brainstormed for an hour to answer the question:

What resources would strengthen your community’s capacity to sustain yourselves as media makers?

The following bullet point list represents the summation/report-back from the small groups about what resources we need to effectively sustain our work.
(As always, please note that I have done my […]