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.