Online publishing is no longer simply the open democratic space we were promised in the early days of the Internet. The media environment certainly allows for certain new forms of free expression, and has created opportunities for stories and voices that may not have found an audience in more traditional publishing. At the same time, these new opportunities sometimes appear within a context determined by larger corporations than ever managed print media, often more beholden to market forces than the old journalistic ethics would have allowed. Moreover, the newly diverse generation of writers on the Internet often meet with brazenly virulent racist and sexist responses that could only flourish with the anonymity of the internet.

This panel consists of both academic and non-academic commentators on and practitioners of new media publishing. They will speak both about their sense of the contemporary situation of web publishing as well as their trajectories as professionals within the new media environment.

Participants include:

Lisa Lucas is the publisher of Guernica magazine. She has served as the director of education at Tribeca Film Institute and consulted for various non-profit arts and cultural organizations, including Sundance Film Festival, San Francisco Film Society, and the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Lisa is also co-chair of the non-fiction committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival. You can find her on Twitter @likaluca.

Ayesha Siddiqi is a cultural critic and the editor in chief of The New Inquiry. She writes at the intersection of pop and politics.

Minh-Ha Pham is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Before arriving to Pratt, she was an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Asian American Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on the structural forces of race, gender, and class shaping contemporary fashion media technologies, discourses, and practices. She's taken up these themes in studies of personal style blogs, virtual fitting rooms, holographic fashion models, fashion design, the digital fashion archive, and in her most recent work, fashion copyright talk and copynorms. Her first book, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. It provides a structural analysis of personal style blogging as a digital labor practice that has similarities to and is in some ways continuous with industrial fashion work. Her current research focuses on the politics and economies of race and fashion authorship. In addition to Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, she is the author of numerous essays published in a wide range of academic journals and mainstream media. Her research has been featured in, among other sites, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and Huffington Post.

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