Mickey Huff, Alex Kane, Michael Stoll, Rebecca Bowe, Chris Roberts, Maximillian Alvarez, Steve Mellon and Marcy Sutherland at the 17th Annual Izzy Award Ceremony. Mohammed Mhawish on screen. Photo by Park Productions.
THE 17th ANNUAL IZZY AWARD:
Celebrating the Best of the Independent Press from 2024
On April 30th, the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College honored this year’s Izzy Award winners at Ithaca College “for outstanding achievement in independent media.”
Steve Mellon (Pittsburgh Union Progress) and Maximillian Alvarez (The Real News Network) collaborated on stories regarding East Palestine, Ohio to expose the toxic environment harming residents long after the 2023 train derailment; Mohammed Mhawish, a journalist from Gaza City who fled to Cairo, Egypt, was recognized for his writing at The Nation covering the ongoing attacks on the Palestinian civilian population; Jewish Currents provided in-depth coverage of Gaza and the related injustices, inequalities, and threats to democracy posed abroad and here at home; and the San Francisco Public Press investigated how the U.S. Navy conducted unethical radiation experiments on the public for years without their knowledge. A video of the event will be posted online at the PCIM website this summer.
This was the first Izzy Award ceremony held in-person on campus since 2019. Numerous luminaries of the independent media world, along with members of the public, were on hand to honor the legacy of I.F. Stone embodied in the work of this year’s winners. The event was preceded by a special dinner honoring this year’s winners where they discussed their work in a more intimate setting with Izzy judges, students, faculty, staff, and administrators. A recording of that panel will be shared with the public this summer on the PCIM website.
Hosted by PCIM Distinguished Director Mickey Huff, the evening’s packed event began with a moving tribute to the late great media scholar Robert W. McChesney, who passed away earlier this spring. Izzy judge and former student of McChesney Professor Victor Pickard and PCIM founding director Jeff Cohen noted some of the countless contributions he made to the media reform movement in support of media democracy and a free and independent press, including his early championing of the creation of the PCIM itself. Throughout the evening, impassioned speakers not only talked about the subjects and impacts of their stories, but also of the great need for a truly independent and free press that reports in the public interest. The evening’s event was co-organized by PCIM’s Marcy Sutherland.
The Izzy Award is named after I. F. Stone, the muckraking journalist who launched I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and challenged McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and government deceit. The 18th Annual Izzy Award, honoring the best independent reporting of 2025, will be held at Ithaca College (IC) next spring on Wednesday, April 22, 2026.
PCIM FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE COMMUNITY
Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored facilitated a virtual presentation on April 24 for students at The Ithacan on Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists. Roth shared research he completed as a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow for 2024-25. He discussed the importance of understanding algorithmic censorship and shadow banning as student reporters participated by asking poignant questions and sharing their perspectives on how digital technologies presented unique challenges to the future of journalism.
Members of the Movement Media Alliance held its governing board meetings on the IC campus and hosted lunches with faculty, staff, and students as they discussed the importance of independent media and worked to chart a path for increased sustainability and outreach for member outlets, some of which include Truthout, Prism, The Real News Network, and many more. MMA members Lara Witt, Maya Schenwar, Ziggy West Jeffery, Kayla Rivara, Jonathan Keen, Da’Shaun Harrison, Cayden Mak, Eleanor Goldfield, Dave Reed and Premal Dharia convened on campus.
Several members of the MMA, along with Izzy winners Maximillian Alvarez and Chris Roberts as well as noted science writer and former IC professor Sandra Steingraber led a masterclass with Professor Schack’s and Huff’s students. The speakers shared their passions and experiences working in independent media, fielded questions, and stayed afterwards to talk to the many individual students who were enthusiastic about the presentations and future networking.
Mickey Huff also joined a panel of media experts for The Deadline Club at the Society of Professional Journalists Region One conference “Reporting in Turbulent Times” at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York City on May 3. Along with media scholars Robin Andersen, Allison Butler, and Mischa Geracoulis, Huff spoke about the importance of independent media and critical media literacy education at a time when concern about mis- and disinformation are at record highs while trust in legacy media is at historic lows. The work of PCIM and groups like Project Censored and Project Look Sharp, for example, highlight ways in which citizens can be more news media literate and more meaningfully civically engaged at a time when various government agencies, programs and related nonprofits are under attack from privatizing forces trying to dismantle them.
The Associate Director of Project Censored, Shealeigh Voitl, joined Mickey for a virtual presentation on media literacy for young people at Burlington High School in Vermont June 5. They discussed the importance of independent media as a vehicle for improved media literacy, and the significance of understanding media framing in addition to simple fact checking of news stories.
Later in June, Mickey will present 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.” They’ll discuss how to build a bold independent media ecosystem in a corporate-news saturated world. In July, Mickey will be joined by 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 SUMMER INTERNSHIP PROGRAM
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 will be gaining experience at a variety of independent media outlets and opportunities. This summer’s PCIM interns include:
- Alefiya Presswala, Rochester Beacon
- Caleb Kaufman, PublicSource
- Kaeleigh Banda, Waging Nonviolence
- Logan Grosse, Convergence Magazine
- Mariana Contreras, Truthout
- Sam Armstrong, Overbrook School for the Blind
- Sonya Mukhina, Truthout
For more information on PCIM sponsored internships, visit here.
STAY TUNED!
Stay tuned over the summer as we share more plans for the fall semester. We already have plans in the works for the Ithaca is Books Festival (September 11th-14th), a Banned Books Week event (October 5th-11th), Free Speech Week activities (October 20th-26th), the release of Project Censored’s 50th Anniversary book on the state of our free press with top stories of the past year from the independent press, and much more!
Fall 2025 Courses: This fall at Ithaca College, in addition to teaching the upper division special topics course on Independent Media: Issues and Challenges for the Journalism Department, Mickey Huff will be 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 will be teaching Issues and the News, Narrative Journalism Workshop, and Journalism History.
PCIM’s FEATURED INDEPENDENT MEDIA OUTLETS
Each Indy Brief, PCIM will share independent media outlets with our readers. For this brief, we share a handful of outlets from current members of the Movement Media Alliance.
Convergence, https://convergencemag.com/
In These Times, https://inthesetimes.com/
Prism, https://prismreports.org/
Scalawag, https://scalawagmagazine.org/
Truthout, https://truthout.org/
For the full list of MMA members, visit Movement Media Alliance.
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 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 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.
The following are excellent 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.
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.
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.
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.