PCIM NEWS
Nominations Now Open for 18th Annual Izzy Award
The nominations for the 18th Annual Izzy Award, named after iconic 20th century muckraker I.F. “Izzy” Stone, are now open! The call was posted and sent out on December 8th and remains open until January 16th, 2026. The ceremony will be held in person at Ithaca College on April 22nd, 2026. 
Journalists, academics, and the public at large are encouraged to submit nominations for an independent media outlet, individual journalist, or producer who publishes their work with an independent, non-corporate outlet, or their individual platform. Self-nominations are permitted.
Work produced by a nonprofit/independent journalism organization and published or broadcast by another independent, non-commercial, non-conglomerated media outlet is eligible. However, work published or broadcast by a “mainstream” (corporate), commercial, or conglomerated media outlet is not eligible — even if it was originally produced by a nonprofit/independent journalism organization.
Questions about nominations can be emailed to msutherland1@ithaca.edu or mhuff2@ithaca.edu. Learn more about Izzy’s life and career here.
New Look Online!
We are pleased to announce that PCIM has a newly rebuilt website! Special thanks to web developer Kate Horgan for her amazing work on the redesign and launch. We’ll be updating the site more over the winter break, which will include recordings of fall events, highlights of student work who worked with us at the center last semester, and more critical media literacy and independent journalism resources.
PCIM FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE COMMUNITY
In collaboration with Project Censored, The Censored Press, and Project Look Sharp, PCIM sponsored a Banned Books Week event October 9th at Ithaca College. This included the screening of the award-winning documentary, Pages of Protest (created by Ithaca alumni), and a conversation with filmmakers, faculty experts Jen Spitzer (English), Cathy Michael (Library), and members from the Banned Books Week Coalition. See the event here.
Just after Free Speech Week (October 20th-26th), PCIM welcomed media scholars Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon to Ithaca College on October 30th to discuss critical AI literacy, surveillance culture, and higher education. They conducted a masterclass, met with the Ithaca Seminar First Year Experience class taught by Professor Huff, and held an open workshop for interested Park school faculty and staff of The Ithacan. See the event here.
In November, PCIM welcomed independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin for a screening of her latest documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, about the US military’s assault on the environment and what can be done about one of the planet’s most destructive polluters. Martin held a vibrant Q&A with a packed house at Park Auditorium and met with interested students afterward. See the event here.
PCIM also hosted investigative journalist Will Potter, who discussed his latest book, Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable, about the growing authoritarianism and attacks on activists and journalists addressing the sordid practices surrounding factory farming. Potter conducted a masterclass and visited Professor Huff’s Ithaca Seminar course on critical media literacy to address the importance of independent, muckraking journalism and news literacy. See the event here.
PCIM celebrated 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. This is Professor Huff’s seventeenth annual co-edited book for the media watchdog that was founded in 1976. Huff embarked on two speaking events in support of the release. On November 21st, Huff hosted a panel of independent media luminaries on the state of the free press at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC. The event was recorded and aired on C-SPAN. November 22nd, he joined a panel at Red Emma’s books in Baltimore. That event was recorded and aired on The Real News Network.
PCIM will cosponsor several events next year celebrating independent journalism in the public interest, including a book panel discussion early in the spring semester, a workshop around news literacy and press freedoms with the Society of Professional Journalists in April, and an academic conference with the Union for Democratic Communications in October of 2026. Stay tuned to PCIM’s newly built website for details!
Recordings of past events can be found here.
PCIM Students and Courses
We were 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. Vivian and Jackie produced original articles that will be published on the PCIM website while Sonya worked on social media promotions. IC student Alefiya Presswala was also a research intern with Project Censored this fall. In addition to researching several validated independent news stories, she also wrote a Dispatch on Media and Politics for the Project on AI data centers that will be published in January. PCIM is also pleased to have been able to support graduating senior Ryan Johnson for an internship this fall with The Real News Network out of Baltimore.
Spring 2026 Courses: This spring at Ithaca College, Mickey Huff will be teaching the upper division special topics course he designed titled, “Fighting Fake News: Press Freedom, Disinformation, and the Post-Truth World.” Marcy Sutherland is teaching “Educational Psychology,” “Early Field Experience,” and supervising graduate students in classrooms within nearby school districts. Todd Schack is on leave for the spring term.
FEATURED INDEPENDENT MEDIA OUTLETS AND MEDIA LITERACY RESOURCES
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:
Media Literacy Clearinghouse Since 1998, award-winning teacher and author Frank W. Baker has curated this online site “where educators could go and locate appropriate resources for teaching about media and media literacy.” This is a very active and up-to-date resource on all things media literacy. Baker is also active on social media, often sharing excellent educator resources. A site not to be missed.
Pressing Issues Free Press Newsletter: “The twice-weekly Free Press newsletter with ideas and analysis about everything happening at the intersection of media, technology and democracy.” In a time when the press is under unprecedented pressure by the current administration and corporate media mergers run amok, Free Press pulls no punches in calling out the threats to press freedoms and is a major force fighting back.
The Roosevelt Institute recently published “The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis” by scholars Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard. This timely and detailed report “reveals how decades of market-first policymaking has systematically eroded the media’s democratic function, leaving the press structurally vulnerable at precisely the moment when independent journalism matters most.”
NEWS MEDIA LITERACY RESOURCES FROM
PROJECT CENSORED
The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People
The Media and Me textbook 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 taught a class based on the text he co-authored with colleagues at Project Censored as part of the Ithaca Seminars this fall for first year students.
Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026
In their latest book, Project Censored celebrates 50 years of news literacy and reporting on the news that didn’t make the news. Highlights include among the most vital independent news stories that corporate media underreported or missed entirely last year, exposes rampant Junk Food News and News Abuse propaganda by establishment media outlets, and tracks rising threats against the press from financial and political powers. The Project’s 50th Anniversary book was coedited by Shealeigh Voitl, Mickey Huff, and Andy Lee Roth and published by The Censored Press November 11th, 2025.
Project Censored in the Classroom
Critical thinking and media literacy are essential skillsets 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 educational programs are used in traditional classrooms and homeschooling or other educational settings to help students of all ages develop critical media literacy skills and enjoy hands-on experience to enhance that education. The Project’s programs give members of the public a means to develop their own media literacy skills while providing sources of trustworthy independent journalism on topics that are not adequately covered by establishment (so-called “mainstream”) news outlets.
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 through a critical media literacy lens. The program airs on the Pacifica network and is carried on more than 60 stations from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City, and from the nation’s capital to right here in Ithaca at WRFI.
The following are excellent additional news literacy resources for the classroom (free!):
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 with 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 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.
Events & Speakers
PCIM 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.
The PCIM Newsletter is edited by Marcy Sutherland.