Leadership
Tracy Van Slyke
Project Director
As its publisher until mid-2007, Tracy oversaw In These Times’ business, communications, and strategy elements. She serves on the leadership council for the Progressive Communicator’s Network and the Spin Project’s Advisory Board. Tracy was the Communications Director for the National Training and Information Center, worked in Knight Ridder’s Washington, D.C. bureau during the 2000 presidential campaign, and covered city and county government for the Iowa City Gazette in Iowa City, IA in 1999 and 2000.
Steve Katz
Since the 1970s Steve has worked with non-profit organizations focusing on the environment, the arts, social justice issues, and neighborhood-based housing development. In addition to his rolewith for The Media Consortium, he is Associate Publisher for Mother Jones, after several years as Vice President of Development for Earthjustice, the nation’s leading non- profit environmental law firm. With a PhD in Sociology he serves on the board of the Turtle Island Restoration Network.
Organization’s Objective
The Media Consortium is a network of 42 media organizations that began to work collaboratively in the wake of the 2004 election. We organized this project in order to address two challenges we all face:
• How to amplify independent journalism's voice in the broader public debates over the crucial political and social issues of our day;
• And how to navigate our way through the next wave of profound technological change - change that is reshaping the media business, not to mention redefining the practice of journalism itself.
Answering these two questions, we concluded, depended on achieving three goals:
• Deepening and broadening the connections among progressive independent media organizations, across all platforms, as well as between our organizations and other partner networks and organizations.
• Making long overdue basic investments in core infrastructure - investments that would give us the capacity to function effectively in this new, more connected world. Some fundamental sector-wide questions needed to be answered, such as: how big is our audience? Who are they? How do we better position our media outlets – and the audiences we serve – in the minds of opinion shapers and “influentials?” Can we make joint investments in training, technology sharing, advertising and promotion, and (not least) our own ability to communicate effectively with one another?
• Collaborating together to amplify our voice, so that we fulfill our role in a democracy as a vibrant, fact-based, community of independent journalism that educates, informs, and, in the end, engages people to act as citizens in creating the world to which we all aspire.
Victory in 2008 and Beyond
