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CONTENT WARNING: This forum will include discussions of sensitive topics related to safety, hate crimes, and state violence. The event will not be recorded.
CCM’s Asian Media Initiative is hosting a forum to bring AAPI community news media journalists into dialogue with experts in surveillance, transnational repression, press freedom, and journalism safety. This is a dedicated space for AAPI journalists to share their lived experiences and strategies for navigating these threats, and to gain access to emerging tools, resources, and insights.
AAPI journalists working in community media newsrooms face unique threats to their press freedom and safety, often from overseas as well as within the U.S. In this election’s central debates – overseas wars, immigration, and reproductive rights – Asian American community journalists are both frontline defenders and targets of disinformation campaigns, discrimination, and political violence.
- How do AAPI media experience and respond effectively to surveillance, censorship, and harassment campaigns?
- How does urban surveillance infrastructure or transnational repression uniquely affect AAPI journalists?
- What legal rights and protections are available to AAPI journalists covering protests, or when community events (including political events) become sites of protest?
- How do “informal” or “soft” forms of surveillance and censorship – deplatforming, exclusion, retaliation, or litigation – impact AAPI media legitimacy and sustainability?
If you are an AAPI community media journalist, and would like to share your press freedom concerns anonymously, please complete this questionnaire.
If you have any questions, contact Kavitha at kavitha.rajagopalan@
Panelists
Kiran Nazish is an award winning journalist, and founding director of the Coalition For Women In Journalism. She spent two decades as a journalist and foreign correspondent covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Mexico, among other places, for the New York Times, LA Times, MSNBC, ABC News, USA Today and others. Witnessing the inequality and discrimination women journalists faced in newsrooms around the world, she founded the Coalition For Women In Journalism, a global organization that primarily focuses on support and advocacy for women, LGBTQ and nonbinary journalists. In 2019, Kiran launched the Press Freedom Newsroom to bring awareness to how women journalists in particular are targeted by repressive regimes, and now covers violations from 128 countries around the world. She was the Stanley Knowles Distinguished Professor in 2019 and 2020, and a senior fellow in international security at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. in 2016.
Gabe Rottman is a senior attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where he directs the Technology and Press Freedom Project, a six-year-old initiative that combines legal work, policy development and advocacy, and public education to address emerging challenges and opportunities at the intersection of technology and press freedom. Rottman also directs the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law. He previously served in various roles at PEN America, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and led federal First Amendment legislative and regulatory advocacy at the ACLU. Rottman has a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in political science and history from McGill University.
Madi Whitman is the Assistant Director of Curriculum Development in the Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. As a cultural anthropologist and STS researcher, Madi investigates data collection and surveillance in higher education in the U.S. This work is currently focused on subjectivity and marginality among students in changing regimes of data collection in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yemile Bucay is a journalism risk advisor and safety trainer. She is resident security advisor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School for Journalism at CUNY and advises PEN America’s Free Expression Programs on safety and security matters. Previously, she was BuzzFeed’s Risk & Security Manager, and was a Fellow in the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Next Gen Safety Trainers program. Before working in news safety, Yemile was a journalist who reported on immigration. She produced a documentary on violence in her native Mexico, led research on online information ecosystems, and taught at Columbia’s Journalism School. Yemile received a B.A. in Humanities from Yale University, and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Moderator
Kavitha Rajagopalan is the director of the Asian Media Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Center for Community Media.
The Center for Community Media’s Asian Media Initiative is the first national program dedicated to building visibility and sustainability in in-language and community-based news media for and by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. Launched in 2022, the AMI published the first national AAPI Media Map & Directory in December 2023.
