THE IZZY AWARD CEREMONY RETURNED TO
ITHACA COLLEGE LAST SPRING
We were excited to hold the 17th Annual Izzy Award ceremony in-person at Ithaca College last April for the first time since 2019. You can see a short and long version of the evening’s proceedings at the links, with thanks to the Park Productions team for their recording and professor Ari Kissiloff for live streaming the event. We hope to see everyone for the 18th Annual Izzy Award on April 22, 2026, at Ithaca College. Nominations will open later this year. Stay tuned for more details!
The Izzy Award is named after maverick journalist I. F. “Izzy” Stone, who launched I. F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism, and racial bigotry. Presented by the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College (PCIM) annually for “outstanding achievement in independent media,” the Izzy Award goes to an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures. You can learn more about Izzy here.
PCIM FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE COMMUNITY
PCIM Summer Internship Program Report
PCIM sponsors a summer internship program aimed at giving Park students the opportunity to work at some of the best independent media institutions and advocacy nonprofits in the nation. Participating students are awarded financial stipends (of up to $3,200). Congratulations to this summer’s interns who gained experience at a variety of independent media outlets. This summer’s eight PCIM interns included:
- Alefiya Presswala (‘26), Journalism major at Rochester Beacon
- Caleb Kaufman (‘26), Film, Photography & Visual Arts major at PublicSource
- Eve McDougall (‘26), Writing for Film, TV & Emerg Media major at TriFest
- Kaeleigh Banda (‘27), Journalism major at Waging Nonviolence
- Logan Grosse (25’), Television & Digital Media Production major at Convergence Magazine
- Mariana Contreras (‘26), Screen Cultures & Journalism majors at Truthout
- Sam Armstrong (‘26), Television & Digital Media Production major at Overbrook School for the Blind
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Sonya Mukhina (‘27), Journalism major at Truthout
For more information on PCIM sponsored internships, visit here.
PCIM’s Summer Highlights
Over the summer, PCIM’s Distinguished Director Mickey Huff presented on a panel with media scholar peers at the Union for Democratic Communications conference at the University of Washington, Tacoma, “The Future We Want: Resistance and Resolve.” The panelists discussed how to build a bold independent media ecosystem in a corporate-news saturated world. In July, Mickey joined several media literacy colleagues, including Nolan Higdon, Sydney Sullivan, and Cyndy Scheibe of Project Look Sharp, on a panel for the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) conference. Their presentation is titled “We the Media: Teaching Media Literacy and Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum to Encourage Informed Civic Engagement.”
PCIM Events This Fall
PCIM joined Project Censored and The Censored Press as co-sponsors of this year’s Ithaca is Books festival (September 11th-14th). Mickey Huff moderated two panels, one with authors, Omar Zahzah and Mischa Geracoulis, each discussing their newly released books, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle (The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press, 2025), and Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza (Routledge, 2025), respectively. The other panel, titled “Make American Think Again,” included Marcy Sutherland, PCIM’s Research and Communications Coordinator, and focused on the importance of independent media and publishing in efforts to fight censorship and promote critical media literacy education. Geracoulis and Zahzah each gave a masterclass about their work to Ithaca College students just before the festival.
PCIM is again teaming up with Project Censored, The Censored Press, and Project Look Sharp in sponsoring a Banned Books Week (October 5th-11th) event on October 9th. This includes the screening of the award-winning film Pages of Protest (created by Ithaca alumni), a conversation with filmmakers, faculty experts, and members from the Banned Books Week Coalition.
Just after Free Speech Week (October 20th-26th), PCIM will welcome media scholars Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon to Ithaca College on October 30th to discuss AI literacy, surveillance culture, and higher education. They will conduct a masterclass, meet with the Ithaca Seminar First Year Experience class taught by Prof. Huff, and hold a workshop for interested Park school faculty and staff at The Ithacan.
In November, we will celebrate the release of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026: 50th Anniversary Edition with the top under reported stories from the independent press and media analysis from the past year and much more! Stay tuned for more information about other fall events as we are working to bring investigative journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin (The Empire Files) to campus in mid-November to screen her new film Earth’s Greatest Enemy; as well as muckraking reporter Will Potter, about his new book Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable.
Additional details for all events will be available on our website and socials.
Contact mhuff2@ithaca.edu and msutherland1@ithaca.edu with inquiries.
Fall 2025 Courses: This fall at Ithaca College, in addition to teaching the upper division special topics course, “Independent Media: Issues and Challenges” for the Journalism Department, Mickey Huff is teaching a new course in the Ithaca Seminar program for first year students, “The Media and Me: An Introduction to Critical Media Literacy.” Todd Schack is teaching “Issues and the News,” “Narrative Journalism Workshop,” and “Journalism History.” Marcy Sutherland is teaching “Educational Psychology,” “Foundations of Special Education and Inclusivity,” and supervising graduate students in classrooms within nearby school districts.
We are delighted to have several Ithaca College students and teaching assistants working with us at PCIM this semester on various projects, including Vivian Rose, Jackie Vickery, and Sonya Mukhina.
Website Revamp
We are also pleased to announce that PCIM will have a newly rebuilt and much improved website later this fall thanks to Web Designer, Kate Horgan. Stay tuned at ParkIndyMedia.org.
PCIM’s FEATURED INDEPENDENT MEDIA OUTLETS
In each newsletter, PCIM shares independent media outlets and critical media literacy resources with our readers in an effort to broaden our media habits and diversify our information diets. This time, we call attention to the following:
The Disinfo Detox podcast, with media scholar Nolan Higdon, featuring his Gaslight Gazette newsletter which breaks down the latest headlines through a critical media literacy lens. Stay tuned for more collaboration between PCIM and Higdon that will focus on opportunities for students to further develop their critical media literacy skills and get more involved in independent media.
The nonprofit organization Free Press recently launched Who Owns the Media that tracks corporate media ownership in a Media Capitulation Index which is a “sweeping investigation” that “analyzes and rates the independence of America’s 35 largest media companies, including the many conglomerates that have recently caved to pressure” from the current Trump administration. This important and timely resource deserves far more attention in our current political climate.
Freedom of the Press Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to building communication tools that better protect journalists and their sources. They also have several projects that serve these interests including the Press Freedom Tracker, a database that archives press freedom violations in the US; and Secure Drop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that allows anonymous sources to leave documents for review; and write on key issues in support of a free and vibrant press.
Iconic consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader’s Capital Hill Citizen is a print-only publication whose reporting harkens back to the golden era of muckraking journalism. With its pithy motto “Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight” mocking Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, Nader and editor Russell Mokhiber, along with a roster of other independent journalists and contributors, write critically and in the public interest about happenings in the nation’s capital that corporate media rarely cover. It’s as refreshing as it is necessary for our times!
NEWS MEDIA LITERACY RESOURCES FROM PROJECT CENSORED
The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People
The Media and Me provides students with tools and perspectives to empower them as autonomous media users. The book explores critical thinking skills to help young people form a multidimensional comprehension of what they read and watch in media, opportunities to see others like them engaging and making change, and insights into their own identity projects. By covering topics like storytelling, building arguments and recognizing fallacies, surveillance and digital gatekeeping, advertising and consumerism, and global social/political challenges through a critical media literacy lens, this book will help students evolve from passive consumers of media to engaged critics and creators. Mickey Huff will teach a class based on this textbook he co-authored with colleagues at Project Censored as part of the Ithaca Seminars in fall of 2025 for first year students. Accompanying free teaching guide.
Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2025
In their latest book, Project Censored highlights the vital independent news stories that corporate media underreported or missed entirely, exposes rampant junk food news and news abuse, and tracks emerging threats against the press from financial and political powers. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press: 50th Anniversary Edition will be released later in November.
Project Censored in the Classroom
Critical thinking and media literacy are essential skill sets for students in the 21st century. Teachers who bring Project Censored into their classrooms give their students direct, hands-on opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy. The Project’s Academic Education programs are used in traditional classrooms, and homeschooling or other educational settings, to help students of all ages develop media literacy skills and enjoy hands-on experience to enhance that education. Our programs informing the public generally leverage the work of these students to provide education to members of the general public who want to engage with our work, whether as a means to develop their own media literacy skills or as a source for trustworthy independent journalism on topics that are not adequately covered by establishment (so-called “mainstream”) news outlets.
The Project Censored Show
Hosted by Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield, this syndicated public affairs program (founded in 2010) covers the news that didn’t make the news and analyzes why though a critical media literacy lens. The program airs on the Pacifica network and is carried on more than 50 stations.
The following are great news literacy resources for the classroom:
Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames (Voitl, Roth)
A Brief Resource Guide to Fake News (Higdon)
Validated Independent News Story – Exercise (VINS)
This assignment highlights the importance of independent media as a vehicle for enhancing news media literacy when comparing/contrasting the coverage published by independent outlets vs. the corporate/establishment media around major issues of the day.
Project Look Sharp has an amazing array of media literacy lessons and materials available for free at their website. Please check out the work of our wonderful friends and allies housed at Ithaca College!
ABOUT PCIM
Launched in 2008 from a generous endowment from the Park Foundation along with the first director Jeff Cohen, also the founder of FAIR.org, the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) is a national center for the study of independent media– focusing on news outlets that create and distribute content outside of corporate systems. This includes employing a critical media literacy analysis of the overall news media ecosystem that looks at the unique role of independent media outlets within it. Throughout history, technological and social upheavals have given rise to independent media to amplify marginalized voices, often around some of the most contested issues. Today, independent media outlets are growing amid crisis and conglomeration in so-called mainstream journalism alongside online sources and new forms of media production and distribution.
The center’s mission is to engage students and media producers across the county in conversation about career paths in independent media, and financially viable ways to disseminate accurate news and information in the public interest that is often not covered in the establishment press. The center examines the impact of independent media and media (il)literacies on journalism, democracy, and political culture.
The PCIM Team
Mickey Huff is the Distinguished Director of PCIM and Professor of Journalism at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. Huff continues to serve as the third director of Project Censored and as president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. He has been a professor of social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2000, where he was chair of the history and journalism departments, and helped co-found the social justice studies program. Huff follows founding PCIM Director Jeff Cohen and Director Raza Rumi. Learn more here.
Marcy Sutherland is the Communications and Research Coordinator for PCIM. Sutherland has been a program manager for various nonprofits, an instructor of education, and a public-school teacher. She is an IC alum ‘02.
Todd Schack is the Associate Director of PCIM and Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Ithaca College. Dr. Schack’s research focuses on the wars on drugs and terror, and journalistic genres such as immersion, music, food, travel, and graphic nonfiction.
Jeremy Lovelett is Managing Editor of The Edge and Communications and Research Associate at PCIM. Lovelett has most recently served a library role in technical services and works in nonprofit communications. He is an IC alum, ’20.
Events & Speakers
The Center regularly invites leading voices in independent media to engage on topics of their expertise. PCIM also collaborates with Project Censored and Project Look Sharp throughout the year.
For more information on the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College (PCIM), visit https://www.parkindymedia.org/ and www.ithaca.edu/indy, or contact pcim@ithaca.edu.