The Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change (CCMISC) is pleased to present its inaugural Otherwise Symposium, a fall event that brings creative leaders and workers together with local community members to discuss inventive approaches to persistent problems in journalism, media and communication.

CCMISC welcomes Report for America (RfA) as the featured guest for the Otherwise Symposium. The program will include an introduction to the CCMISC, a keynote from RfA co-founder and CEO, Steve Waldman, and a panel discussion featuring current RfA corps members and alumni. It will be followed by a reception. The event is free and open to the public, and is of particular interest to anyone who works in, consumes, or cares about journalism, media and storytelling.

Joining the panel discussion are:

Srishti Prabha, Sacramento education reporter at CapRadio (KXJZ 90.5 FM)

Sam Gonzalez Kelly, a reporter at the Houston Chronicle

Donte Kirby, a reporter at the Baltimore-based digital news site, Technical.ly

Hadley Hitson, the Montgomery Advertiser’s rural south reporter.

About RfA
Founded in 2019, Report for America is an intervention designed to address job loss, lack of diversity, and cuts to coverage in news outlets around the country. Participants spend two to three years working in local newsrooms in a model similar to the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. News organizations compete to host fellows, and contribute half of the funding for their salaries; the other half is paid by RfA through donor support.

About CCMISC
As the newest center within the College of Arts, Media, and Design, CCMISC is a research, teaching and communications hub that applies a four-pronged approach (experimentation, creation, intervention and preservation) to disrupt historically dominant power structures in media and communication.

Led by Dr. Meredith D. Clark, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Department of Communication Studies, CCMISC counts faculty and graduate students among its members, and welcomes individuals from Roxbury and surrounding areas to join its Citizen Advisory Board. CCMISC is guided by three statements of core values:

• Collaboration and collective inquiry
• Work that is historically informed and futuristically oriented
• Projects defined as audacious experiments

Center members are engaged in an array of individual and collective projects, including an investigation of how news media erases women from its visual narratives; a study on the impact of efforts to diversify food journalism; the preservation of Black digital culture, and the creation of an audio storytelling training program designed to equip young women in the Boston area with skills to write, edit, and produce their own narratives.

Information about the application processes for the community advisory board and the community-based communication grants program will be announced during the event.

Attendees will also have an opportunity to discuss their own projects and explore potential collaborations with CCMISC members during a reception following the event.