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The Center for Community Media is hosting a symposium on how community media can and do respond to hate crimes targeting Black, Asian, Jewish, and LGBTQ communities. How do community journalists help keep the most vulnerable members of their communities safe and informed, and bring diverse community members together to support each other? How can we cover hate crimes without re-traumatizing survivors? What is the legal and media history of how we define and document hate crimes – and how have hate crimes data functioned in our popular and in-community narratives around racism, solidarity, and safety?
Featuring two distinguished speakers with expertise in civil rights, racism, and community safety; a panel discussion with Black, Asian, Jewish, and LGBTQ community media journalists covering hate crimes in their communities; and two workshops on research and editorial best practices, this conference will bring community media journalists, journalism students, and members of the Newmark J-School community into a conversation about how we can collectively understand and respond to ongoing crises of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, homophobic and transphobic violence in our society today.
Location: This hybrid event will take place in-person on a CUNY campus in midtown Manhattan, New York City, with a Zoom registration option available for those who wish to attend virtually. Breakfast, coffee, and lunch will be provided to in-person attendees. The exact location of the symposium and in-person workshop will be confirmed prior to the symposium and shared in advance.
Distinguished Speakers
Maya Wiley is the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund. A nationally respected civil rights attorney, Wiley has been a litigator for the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She has been a program creator in philanthropy, non-profits, government, and higher education. She helped create a criminal justice program for a major foundation in South Africa. Wiley co-founded and led a national policy advocacy organization, the Center for Social Inclusion, now a part of Race Forward, a national policy strategy organization working to end structural racism. She became the first Black woman to be Counsel to a New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, where she worked to protect and expand civil rights, Minority and Women-Owned Business contracts and broadband access. Wiley became a Senior Vice President for Social Justice at the New School University, where she also founded the Digital Equity Laboratory. While there, she chaired the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). As chair, she led the release of the “hold” on proceedings against Daniel Pantaleo whose illegal chokehold killed Eric Garner, and Co-Chaired the Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group that authored two major reports on integrating New York City public schools. Wiley has received numerous awards, and has been a public voice for rights, justice, and democracy, through written opinion editorials and as a former legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, educator, and editor. She is the editor of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews (Haymarket Books), researcher and writer of several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series and edited book, and guest editor of the recently published Critical Sociology forum “Race and Money.” Tamara’s research, academic publications, popular pieces, and public educational lectures focus on Black-Asian solidarity politics, Asian American communities, data literacy (particularly around crime data), policing and surveillance, and the racial wealth gap.
Panelists
Philissa Cramer is the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s editor-in-chief. Prior to joining JTA in 2020, she was a founder and editor at Chalkbeat, the nonprofit news organization covering education. A graduate of Brown University, she lives in suburban New York City with her husband, a rabbi, and their two children.
Jason Villemez is the editor of the Philadelphia Gay News and writes frequently on LGBTQ history. His work has appeared in the PBS NewsHour, LGBTQ Nation, and local LGBTQ publications across the country. He lives in Philadelphia with his husband.
Yiyan Zheng is a bilingual journalist with more than six years of experience. Her multimedia work has appeared in media outlets such as World Journal, Sampan Newspaper, Beijing TV, Propeller TV and City Limits. She is New York based and work as a reporter and a journalist at World Journal, the largest Chinese-language daily newspaper in the U.S. Her beat is to cover Asian and immigrant communities on politics, education and health. She was a CUNY 2022 New York State Elections Reporting Fellow, an Age Boom Academy Fellow at Columbia University and a Journalist Fellow of Aging Program at the Gerontological Society of America. She was a finalist of the Chinese-Language Journalism Award for Overseas Media in 2022. A graduate of Waseda University in Tokyo, with a BA in Comparative Literature, Yiyan received her MS in Journalism from Boston University.
Christina Carrega is an award-winning journalist and the National Criminal Justice Reporter for Capital B. Previously, Christina was a Crime and Justice Reporter for CNN, Multimedia Reporter for ABC News, News Editor of The Queens Daily Eagle and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspapers as well as a Criminal Justice Reporter for The New York Daily News and The New York Post. During Christina’s career, she has covered wrongful conviction cases, thoroughly reported on high-profile trials and investigated alleged scams in the travel and childcare industries. Christina’s professional journalism career began as a freelancer with the Canarsie Courier and as the Newspaper Director for The Greater Ridgewood Youth Council, a non-profit after-school program in Queens, New York. The New York Association of Black Journalists (NYABJ) awarded her first place for 2017’s’ and 2014’s Best Spot News and in 2013 was a finalist for the National Association of Black Journalists’ (NABJ) Best Single News Story. She previously served as NYABJ’s Vice President of Broadcast. Christina is an adjunct professor with the American Journalism Online Graduate Program at New York University and serves on the board of Princess Chambers Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to uplifting underprivileged youth. Christina is a first-generation born American and was raised in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from St. John’s University, where she majored in Journalism and minored in International Studies.
Workshop Leaders
Heather E. Murray is the Managing Attorney of the Local Journalism Project at the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic. In this role, she oversees the Local Journalism Project’s pro bono work with journalists and news outlets, including providing legal advice and representation in suits seeking access to public records and court proceedings and defending First Amendment and newsgathering rights. She previously was a litigation associate in the New York City offices of two international law firms and a local journalist for newspapers in Westchester and New York City. She serves as the chair of the board of directors of Queens and Brooklyn child welfare agency Forestdale, Inc.
Michael Kilian is New York state editor for Gannett, overseeing news sites upstate and downstate, including his hometown newspaper the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, where he is the executive editor. He has been a newspaper editor since 1990, working primarily with Gannett Co. Inc. in locations including Saratoga Springs, Utica and Rochester, New York; Burlington, Vermont; Salisbury, Maryland; and Cincinnati, Ohio. While news director at The Cincinnati Enquirer, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2018 for coverage of the heroin epidemic. Kilian is a graduate of Cornell University.
