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Farai Chideya
Host of NPR's News and Notes
Travels From: NY
Fee Range: $4500 - $7500
Farai Chideya is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, online, and radio. Prior to joining NPR's News & Notes, Chideya hosted Your Call, a daily news and cultural call-in show on San Francisco's KALW 91.7 FM. Chideya has also been a correspondent for ABC News, anchored the prime time program Pure Oxygen on the Oxygen women's channel, and contributed commentaries to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and BET. She got her start as a researcher and reporter at Newsweek magazine. In 1997 Newsweek named her to its "Century Club" of 100 people to watch.
Chideya, who was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated with a B.A. from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1990, is also the founder of PopandPolitics.com, an online journal for younger Americans based at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. Chideya and PopandPolitics.com have won awards including a MOBE IT Innovator award, being named one of Alternet's New Media Heroes, and ranking in PoliticsOnline.com's worldwide survey of "25 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics."
Chideya has published three books. Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans (Plume Penguin, 1995), is now in its eighth printing. The Color of Our Future (William Morrow, 1999), explores the changing racial identities of America's teens, and her travels from the Crow reservation in Montana to a ninety-nine percent white Indiana town to South Central Los Angeles. The Color of Our Future was named one of the best books for teens by the New York Public Library. It and Don't Believe the Hype are featured in college curricula across the country. Chideya's newest book, Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters (Soft Skull, 2004), shows why half of Americans are cut out of the political system — and what we can do about it.
In 1996, Chideya completed a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center fellowship, examining why young Americans are tuning out the news. In 2001-2002, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She has published articles in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Time, Spin, Vibe, O, The California Journal, Mademoiselle, and Essence. Awards for her writing and broadcast work include a 2004 "Young Lion" award from the Black Entertainment & Telecommunications Association (BETA), a GLAAD Award for the Spin article "Hip Hop's Black Eye," and a National Education Reporting Award for work at Newsweek. She currently serves on the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Knight Foundation, which disburses over $20 million in journalism-related grants each year.