Open Media Boston Receives the 2008 Cloward-Piven Award from the New Political Science Caucus of the APSA

Last Saturday, Open Media Boston was honored to receive the 2008 Richard Cloward-Frances Fox Piven Award from the New Political Science Caucus of the American Political Science Association at a ceremony at the Marriott Copley Hotel - site of the APSA annual convention. In his remarks prior to giving out the award, award committee char Prof. Victor Wallis of the Berklee College of Music indicated that the committee decided to grant the award to Open Media Boston after only 5 months of publication because of the promise and importance of the work we are doing towards the resurgence of community-based independent news media in the U.S.

The Cloward-Piven Award is given to two non-profit organizations a year in the host city of the APSA convention "for their commitment to the struggle for a better world." Centro Presente of Somerville, MA, an immigrant rights organization oft-covered in these pages, was the other award recipient this year. Each of the winning organizations received a nice trophy and a check for $1000.

The award is named for two famed progressive sociologists and activists - the late Prof. Cloward of Columbia University, best known as a co-founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization, and his wife, Prof. Piven of The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, whose achievements are too extensive to list here ... though most recently she was the president of the American Sociological Association, and was present at last weekend's ceremony to shake hands and chat with the awardees.

The event was followed by a reception at the hotel.

Open Media Boston would like to extend our sincere appreciation and thanks to the award committee and the New Political Science caucus for granting us this signal accolade. We will do our best to live up to the exhortation of the award, and will strive to link our "struggle for a better world" to the pursuit of high journalistic standards and cutting-edge use of collaborative media technology in the public interest.

We will display the award trophy prominently at next week's Benefit for the Open Media Boston Youth Training in Collaborative Media, from 7-10 p.m., at encuentro 5 in Boston's Chinatown. We feel it was jointly won by everyone in the burgeoning Open Media Boston community. And we continue to encourage everyone in the Boston area interested in building a more just society to join our community and plug into our effort to help remake the mass media. So come celebrate with us.

Check out the following link for more information: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/954258.

Click this link to check out past editorials: http://www.openmediaboston.org/editorial.

Photo by Marisa Figueiredo.