Mark your calendars for the  MAC/Scholastic Luncheon
Friday, Aug. 7, 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. at the AEJMC 2009 Convention

Guest speaker: Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News columnist and co-host of
Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.  

Topic: "Race and News In America: What Can We Learn from the Past in this
Age of Media Upheaval?"

Luncheon tickets can be purchased when registering for the AEJMC Convention.  

Juan Gonzalez has been a staff columnist at the New York Daily News for more
than 20 years and co-hosts with Amy Goodman the nationally syndicated news
show Democracy Now. He is former president of the National Association of
Hispanic Journalists, for which he created the Parity Project, a program
designed to help news organizations recruit and retain Hispanic reporters
and managers and improve coverage of the Latino community. He was the Belle
Zeller Visiting Professor in Public Policy at Brooklyn College from 2000 to
2002, where he taught courses in both media studies and Puerto Rican and
Latino history.  He received the George Polk Award in 1998 for commentary. 
Gonzalez was the first reporter in New York City to write on the health
effects arising from the September 11, 2001, attacks.  He has published
three books: Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade
Center Collapse; Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America; and
Roll Down Your Window: Stories of a Forgotten America.  Gonzalez's
forthcoming book, co-authored with Joe Torres, offers a survey of the many
battles that erupted throughout U.S. history between the African American,
Latino, Asian American and Native American press and the dominant white
press, with discussion of how federal communications policy has affected the
news and information needs of people of color.  In the book, the authors
uncover a wealth of information about the role of minorities in the media
that has never been collected in any single volume before.

The event is sponsored by the Scholastic Journalism Division and the
Minorities and Communication Division.  Partial funding for this luncheon
was provided by the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University.