Five years ago, Farai Chideya founded PopandPolitics.com, an online site reporting on issues ranging from political analysis to hip hop and electronic music, aimed at engaging a younger, more urban audience. She and the site have won a MOBE IT Innovator award and been named one of Alternet’s New Media Heroes. In addition to running her website, Chideya is currently a Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Chideya, named in 1997 by Newsweek to its "Century Club" of 100 people to watch, is the author of the stereotype-shattering book, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural MisinformationAbout African-Americans, published by Plume Penguin in 1995 and now in its eighth printing.

Her second book, The Color of Our Future, interviewing and analyzing the lives of today’s diverse teens and those in their early twenties, was published in 1999 by William Morrow.

During the 1996 Presidential election campaign, Chideya was a CNN Political Analyst and was named to the New York Daily News’ "Dream Team" of political reporters and commentators for her work. After that, she was an ABC New correspondent from 1997-1999, where she covered such topics as youth, race, and politics.

Chideya was a writer for MTV News from 1994 to 1996, and prior to that, she reported for Newsweek magazine in New York, Chicago and Washington, covering a wide range issues from labor issues to following the President as a pool reporter on Air Force One.

Derek Alger: You state on the home page of PopandPolitics that "The worst crisis we face today is not in our cities or neighborhoods, but in our minds." Could you elaborate?

Farai Chideya: I believe America is the greatest country in the world, or at least the country with the greatest potential. We have so much incredible, breathtaking beauty, from the way the light blends in the desert air to literally create "purple mountains’ majesty" to the rich green beauty of the Deep South. But we also have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We have so much wealth and massive child poverty. I have to believe that our failures to solve some of these problems comes from a lack of will, a problem in our minds that say some people are disposable and not worth educating or properly employing. We see this as part of the cost of doing business in our business-oriented society, but it comes back to haunt us in the form of poverty and crime.

DA: What prompted you to start Pop and Politics, obviously a lot of time and effort has gone into it?

FC: The site started out with diaries from the 1996 Republican and Democratic conventions. Over time, PnP has built a roster of fantastic writers, from Pulitzer Prize winner Pamela Newkirk to dramatist Anna Deveare Smith, who’ve enlarged our ability to cover current news and culture.

DA: You completed a Freedom Forum Media Studies fellowship examining why young Americans are tuning out the news. What conclusions did you come up with?

FC: Younger Americans -- and I speak here mainly of people in their 20s and 30s -- are rarely seen in speaking roles on network news. The target audience is middle aged, middle-class, and white. The networks use people meters to test what stories those audiences like, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that that’s the kind of audience they get. Meanwhile, younger audiences have drifted away, and many people don’t watch the news at all. To change that, news editors will have to really respect the voices of their whole potential audience -- younger and older, of all ethnicities. But narrow casting to different groups has become the norm.

DA: Do you think that access to online sites will help increase awareness of political and social issues?

FC: There are a lot of fantastic sites helping to build awareness of international issues, particularly MediaChannel.org. What’s wonderful about the web is that so many people are putting out good content, from listservs like Davey D’s 90,000 person e-mail list for hip hop heads (also found at DaveyD.com) to TavisTalks.com and Alternet.org. But one of the things I find best about the web is the way people form their own e-mail listservs of just a few people, trading information they need among friends.