“Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future” with Amy Goodman
April 22 @ 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm EDT
Join us for a conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! about the role and future of independent media, followed by a conversation about stories over the past two decades building the Sanctuary’s campus with outgoing ED Steve Pierce. They will be joined by Hudson Mohawk Magazine’s Willie Terry and moderator KP Holler, the Executive Director of Media Alliance for the second night of our weekend celebration “Rooted in independent media, growing toward a just future!”
Co-sponsored by Women Against War.
Masking is mandatory for this event
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”
Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before than, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Breaking the Sound Barrier, both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.
Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.
She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.
Did you know?
The Sanctuary’s IndyMedia Roots: Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center
A group of independent media makers met together from the years of 2020 to 2005 as the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, in places around town including the Harriet Tubman Peace Room at the Troy YWCA. We were part of the Independent Media movement, which had over 150 groups from around the world.
We produced several videos during that time, including the IndyMedia War & Peace Trilogy, which included “Independent Media in a Time of War,” created after we invited Amy Goodman to visit Troy to feature her new book. As a collective, we recorded her speech. and then gathered together to incorporate media footage of the war to illustrate Amy’s inspirational words. Amy distributed many copies as she gave book talks around the world as she , which gave us royalties: this money allowed us to rent then buy this old church from local community organizer Russell Ziemba. Check out Independent Media in a Time of War, which planted the seeds for The Sanctuary for Independent Media!
In 2005, we immediately began to transform this abandoned space, which in its roots a century earlier was a Lutheran Church. Originally thinking that this would offer us a place for production, we quickly realized that this space offered the much-needed opportunity to generate a community around anti-war events and screenings. There were no places around focusing on making and showing independent media dedicated to anti-war and justice networks. Our roots were dedicated to a non-commercial model for arts and culture!
A collective of founders met to strategize, and named our new home The Sanctuary for Independent Media. After hours of engaged discussions reviewing diverse non-hierarchical models for organizing, we came to realize that becoming a non-profit model was critical for applying for grants. Rather than starting a new one, we resuscitated an independent media arts organization that several of us had been engaged in as part of the early video art scene: New York Media Alliance, representing a network of independent media arts organizations across New York State (who connected before the internet!) for creative support and advocacy, and had recently gone dormant. We took up the 501c3 with New York Media Alliance, deciding that our shift to a non-profit was essential to long-term sustainability, while still embracing our non-hierarchical philosophies for community-engaged participatory art and action, media democracy and independent journalism.
The Hudson Mohawk IndyMedia collective was still active during the first several years at the Sanctuary. There are almost no IndyMedia groups left, with only a few surviving organizations which still offer independent media platforms for progressive community building.
We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.
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