Speaker Bios

Juan González has been a professional journalist for more than 40 years and was a staff columnist at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award for commentary (1998 and 2010) and was inducted into the Deadline Club’s New York Journalism Hall of Fame in 2015. A professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University from 2017 to 2023, he is currently a Senior Fellow at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois-Chicago.

González is one of the founders and a past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and a member of NAHJ’s Hall of Fame. During his term as NAHJ president, González created the Parity Project, an innovative program that created partnerships between local communities and media organizations to improve coverage of the Latino community and to recruit and retain more Hispanic journalists. He also spearheaded a movement among U.S. journalists to join other citizen groups in opposing the Federal Communications Commission’s deregulation of media ownership restrictions.

A founding member of the Young Lords Party in the 1970s and of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the 1980s, González has twice been named by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the country’s most influential Hispanics and has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Puerto Rican Coalition.

He is the author of five books, including: the classic Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2000, second edition 2011, third edition 2022), which has been required reading in hundreds of college courses for decades and even spawned an award-winning documentary film narrated by González; News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media,” (2012) co-authored with Joseph Torres, which was a New York Times best-seller and finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; and Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse (2002), which chronicles his work as the first reporter to uncover health hazards at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the subsequent as cover-ups of the dangers by the Environmental Protection Agency and other government officials. His latest book, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, explores the rise of a new generation of progressive municipal leaders and offers valuable lessons for those seeking grassroots reform.

Over the years, more than two dozen feature films and documentaries have featured González as a figure or expert commentator, including: the landmark PBS series Latino Americans (2013); the PBS documentary 9/11’s Unsettled Dust (2021); Takeover (2021), on the occupation by the Young Lords of a South Bronx hospital to protest poor health services; the CNN series 1968: The Year that Changed America, (2018); the Media Education Foundation’s Latinos Beyond Reel: Challenging a Media Stereotype (2012); the Ric Burns history of Latino New York, Nueva York (2010); the PBS biography Roberto Clemente (2008); Spike-TV’s Viva Baseball (2005).

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”

Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before than, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Breaking the Sound Barrier, both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.

Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.