Tickets available at the door $80

A Conversation on the media and Independent Journalism
with Ray Suarez, Deborah Jian Lee, and Alissa Quart

In an age where audiences are often divided by disinformation and political hostility, what are the best strategies to save and create a media for working people?

During these challenging times - what do we need to know to support independent journalism and effectively exercise our civic responsibility to voice dissent - to defend the First Amendment right to express ideas and opinions without fear of punishment, censorship and retaliation.

Join famed broadcaster Ray Suarez and acclaimed reporters, Alissa Quart and Deborah Jian Lee, from the media non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project for a conversation on what will – and should – become the focus of media during this administration. We will show how innovative independent journalism can better serve working people and cover issues that are important to all of us - free speech, wages, inflation, discrimination, and more.

We encourage the audience to come ready to ask questions and share their own stories about how they are dealing with seismic shifts in American life. Where do you find the narratives that make sense to you and help you through? What are the issues of our time that are being missed?

Ray Suarez was a correspondent and anchor a public television's nightly newscast The PBS NewsHour for 14 years. He is the host of On Shifting Ground, a syndicated radio program on NRP and PRX stations across the U.S. Suarez's latest book is We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century: An Oral History.

Alissa Quart is the Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of five books of nonfiction including the acclaimed Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. For close to a decade, she has run the Economic Hardship Reporting Project that she built with the late Barbara Ehrenreich.

Deborah Jian Lee is an award-winning journalist and radio producer, journalism fellow at Harvard Divinity School and the author of Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon Press). She has worked as a staff reporter for the Associated Press, taught journalism at Columbia University, and has bylines in Esquire, Fast Company, ELLE, Foreign Policy, TIME, WBEZ and others. Winner of a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award and the Education Writers Association’s Eddie Prize, she was also named a finalist for the Livingston Awards.

Books available for purchase at the event include We Are Home by Ray Suarez and Going For Broke, from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

This program is part of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center 15th Anniversary Civic Conversation Series hosted by the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation. The Lafayette Library Foundation's 15th Anniversary Program Series is sponsored in part by Orchard Nursery and Friends of the Lafayette Library. Special thanks to the Claremont Resort & Club for their support. Proceeds from this event benefit the Lafayette Library.

A Conversation on the Media with Ray Suarez

Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation