New America Media / Pacific News Service

""I know that many of us are perplexed, baffled and depressed over what we see as the real demise of mainstream media. And we think the blog is sort of the alternative. What we''ve discovered here is a much broader landscape of journalism and communication that I think offers great promise for continuing the mandate, the mission of mainstream journalism. I think ultimately we will create a kind of fusion and this is the growth just in ethnic media, which is of course the throb, but the enormous growth of youth media."
Sandy Close, in an Aug. 18, 2005 interview with The Media Giraffe Project. "

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UPDATES:
New America News organizes First National Ethnic Media Awards.

Sandra Close delivered the keynote address on Oct. 29, 2005, at the annual meeting of the Online News Association.

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From the Pacific News Service website:

About Pacific News Service

"Pacific News Service is a nonprofit media organization that was founded in 1969 as an alternative source of news and analysis on the U.S. role in Vietnam. Since then, we have evolved into a highly experimental communications hub for journalists, scholars, filmmakers, artists and young people dedicated to bringing the seldom heard, often most misunderstood or ignored voices and ideas into the public forum. PNS produces a daily news syndicate and sponsors magazine articles, books, TV segments (including Richard Rodriguez''s essays for PBS''s "News Hour with Jim Lehrer") and films (including the 1997 Oscar-winning documentary "Breathing Lessons"). "

Pacific News Service History

The nonprofit, Pacific News Service was founded in 1969 by Orville Schell (now a noted author, journalist and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley) and UC-Berkeley historian and sociologist Franz Schurmann (former head of the Center for Chinese Studies and author of numerous books on China and on foreign affairs)...

Under Close''s direction, PNS specialized in identifying and reporting on then little-noted but epoch-making trends like immigration, the computer/information revolution, the spread of religious fundamentalism, the isolation of inner cities, America''s growing enmeshment with Mexico and Central America, the emergence of a new generation of isolated, marginalized and violent young people, and the shifting landscape of race relations in California where racial and ethnic minorities were replacing whites as the state''s new majority population.

PNS described its news beat in that decade as "the chicken''s eye view of the world" " a bottom-up perspective that specialized in "anthropological journalism."

See also: SUNDAY INTERVIEW -- Sandy Close The executive director of Pacific News Service talks about her two decades on the radical edge of journalism, by Jon Stewart, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

PHOTO: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/ethnic_media/images/ethnic_close1.jpg

New America Media / Pacific News Service

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