Ask a Mentor-Editor: Zeba Khan, finalist in The Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit Contest”

Zeba Khan is an independent social media consultant who works with nonprofits, and an advocate for Muslim-American civic engagement. In 2008, Zeba founded Muslim-Americans for Obama, a social network dedicated to mobilizing the Muslim-American community in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She is also the creator of the online grassroots community for The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, a nonprofit that aims to help U.S.-affiliated Iraqis successfully resettle in the U.S. Most recently, Zeba consulted with Ashoka’s Youth Venture to help develop their first-ever global virtual campaign to incubate young social entrepreneurs worldwide.

Zeba’s work and writings have been featured in numerous media outlets including Newsweek, NPR, Reuters, Voice of America, Washington Post, The Guardian and The Stanford Social Innovation Review. Her work was also highlighted at the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York.

Ravenna Koenig (OpEd Project Intern): You are a social media consultant for nonprofit organizations, correct? What exactly does your work entail? How did you get started at that job?

Zeba Khan: Initially, I used social media like most of my friends – to connect, plan social events, stay in touch, etc. After I graduated from grad school, my interest in social media changed out of necessity. I had a friend who was starting up a nonprofit to help Iraqi refugees. He had a small staff and very limited funding but he also had a large number of people who wanted to give of their time. I realized pretty quickly that he had no way to harness these volunteers effectively given funding and staffing constraints. The easiest and most efficient solution was to build a social network so that these volunteers could identify themselves to one another and mobilize. The network grew rapidly, spawning chapters across the country, eventually becoming a very critical arm of the nonprofit. That was my introduction to how social media could be used to help an organization achieve its goals and improve its operations. Since then, I’ve consulted for numerous nonprofits and higher education institutions.  Each client has different objectives and focus but essentially my role is to help them think strategically about new media and what aspects of it make sense to implement given their specific goals.

RK: When you were an undergraduate did you have a firm idea of what you wanted to do? If not, how did your interest in women and minority issues evolve?

ZK: Not at all. I’ve always been interested in social justice and how inequality affects different populations. Looking back, those interests were continuously reflected in what I studied, what I chose to research and what I write about throughout college.  After college, those academic interests became more active and I pursued them through my work –whether that work was focused on youth, low-income residents of my city, or my faith community.

RK: How have your interests in media evolved over the course of your career?

ZK: Beyond being a consumer of news, I wasn’t very interested in media. I enjoyed writing but only for myself. I only began to think about my potential contribution in the field after graduate school. I think my interest came through a combination of realizing that writing was one of the most effective ways to make an impact in tandem with my field work (with various nonprofits). I also think it took time for me to become confident enough to even start trying to write publicly.

RK: You recently were selected as the first runner-up in The Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit Contest.” Your work was subjected to criticism and praise from both the American Public and professional members of the media. How was that experience? What did you learn from it?

ZK: Being subjected to the feedback of the WaPo editors and readers from across the country was one of the best experiences about the competition. I recognized from the start that not everyone has the chance to have the entire country be their writing coach and I took full advantage of it. Positive feedback encouraged me and substantive negative feedback only helped sharpen my writing. And I learned pretty quickly to let the baseless nasty feedback roll off my back.  All in all, I grew a thicker skin and I walked away more confident in my writing.

RK: Was the televised aspect of punditry at all limiting? I noticed Jonathan Caphart’s critique on your not smiling enough. Was that frustrating at all—being told to smile when you wanted your work and the issues it spotlighted to be the focus?

ZK: Talking about the news off the cuff in front of a camera with very limited time is definitely a new experience for me. There is so much more at play than your thoughts or your argument and with barely any time to express yourself, I found it to be a pretty challenging medium. As for Jonathan’s critique of me not smiling enough, it bothered me initially. I thought to myself, how can anyone smile when talking about unemployment, war, healthcare, etc? But ultimately, it is television and you need to engage the viewer. You’re not going to achieve that through scowling, no matter how informative you are. That’s not to say a big cheesy smile is good either but I’ve learned from my experience and from talking with seasoned pundits that slight changes in facial expressions can translate in big ways on camera. There are ways to smile without actually smiling.

RK: Have you had any encountered sexism in your professional life?

ZK: I can’t say that I’ve ever dealt with any sexism in my line of work. I think that might have something to do with the fact that much of what I do is online… a far more democratic space than a traditional work place.

RK: What is the one thing that helped you to get where you are that you didn’t expect?

ZK: Certainly my family and close friends have been supportive of me and I know their support has been immensely important. What I didn’t expect was what a profound effect the OpEd Project seminar with Katie would have on me. One amazing seminar at the right time made me determined and confident enough to submit my first pieces to national print and online papers.

Op-Ed Opportunity: Superbowl Ad Crying out for Commentary

A new anti-choice advertisement slated to run during the Superbowl that “uses one story to subtly dictate morality to the American public, and encourages women to disregard medical advice, potentially putting their lives at risk.”

This situation is particularly striking, considering that CBS’s Superbowl ads have, in the past, been carefully vetted to exclude ads where “substantial elements of the community (are) in opposition to one another” – for example, ads from PETA and MoveOn.org.

In the ad—paid for by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family—Pam Tebow explains how, after contracting amoebic dysentery on a missionary trip to the Philippines, she refused to listen to the doctors who advised her to abort her pregnancy when “the medicines used for her recovery threatened her unborn fetus.” That fetus turned out to be football superstar Tim Tebow.

“An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year – an event designed to bring Americans together regardless of background, faith, ideology or political affiliation,” says Jehmu Greene, President of the Women’s Media Center.

Please consider writing an op-ed about this!

The Women’s Media Center has launched a campaign calling CBS to immediately pull this anti-choice advertisement set to air during Super Bowl XLIV and has been blogging about the issue here. Here are some angles they’ve suggested:

- faith perspective
- medical (doctor/nurse) perspective
- woman who faced same situation as Pam Tebow, made different decision
- diehard sports fan, keep your politics out of my football game
- parents of children watching Super Bowl – having the discussion the ad will bring up
- female athlete perspective – how would this conversation be different if a woman athlete was talking about choice

Ask a Mentor Editor: Alissa Quart on literary nonfiction, her new book, and her conversion from a writer who reports to a reporter who writes.

Alissa Quart is the author of two non-fiction books, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (Basic Books, 2003) and Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press, 2006). She is currently working on her third book about the effect of subcultures on the mainstream, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is a contributing writer to Mother Jones as well as Columbia Journalism Review, where she writes a media column, and has written for the New York Times Magazine as well as many other publications. She has taught at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as well as Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she is a fellow. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Brown University and is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. OpEd Project intern Ravenna Koenig interviewed her on her professional and personal experiences in the realm of literary nonfiction.

Ravenna Koenig: What would you identify as the most formative experience in terms of your association with journalism?

Alissa Quart: I was an intern at the “Voice Literary Supplement” when I was twenty-one. I hadn’t wanted to be a journalist—I had gone there for reviewing; I was only really interested in criticism. But because I was interested in criticism I was in this great environment where people were doing these long-form stories. Also, I think a lot of it was reading—I’d say my biggest experiences came when I’d read amazing non-fiction books and think “I want to do that, I want to make that, I want to experience those things.”

RK: So you saw journalism as sort of a gateway into the area of publishing non-fiction?

AQ: Yeah, I was not interested in traditional journalism, I was interested in the work of Mary McCarthy, Frances Fitzgerald, William Finnegan, Michael Herr. I just felt that I wanted to be in the world in a highly receptive way—making sense of it through language. And also, it seemed sort of glamorous to me. There was an intellectual glamour to certain kind of journalist that seemed great to me. For me it was always “will I have an academic career or be a journalist?” I decided that I’d like to be whatever was in between.

RK: I know that you have two books out “Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers,” and “Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child,” and you’re working on your third. Do you see an underlying theme in the books and articles you write?

AQ: It might seem like: “what’s the link between a piece on Iceland and a story about people who define themselves as insane, or a piece I’m writing now on Asperger’s [disorder];” the link is creativity and coercion, the things that keep people from connecting and from living in a heterogeneous way. There’s a set of values behind it all. And then there’s a certain relationship to language; I’m committed to writing in a way that has a real sense of sound—it’s kind of a poet’s value.

RK: I know that when you were young you were really interested in writing poetry, and you come to non-fiction writing with that background. Do you think poetry has influenced the way you report? Do you report differently because of it?

AQ: I mean—I guess I report differently than some people… I want to get into people’s psyches—I think of it as emotional reporting. I think poetry has changed things for me just because it has led me to non-mainstream culture; it made me very interested in non-mainstream culture.

RK: How have your interests in media evolved over the course of your career?

AQ: I think I’ve become a much better reporter. I actually became more into reporting than writing… I prefer talking to people, I prefer going places, I prefer reading… more than writing. Initially I was like, “oh I have to report, this is the kind of writing you have to do to support yourself, if I could I would just write criticism but that’s not what people are buying.” Reporting seemed like work, and then the more I’ve done it, the more it seems like fun and the work is the writing! Now all I want to do is report. It’s really great: you get to see the world in a really different way.

RK: You’re working on your new book currently, correct?

AQ: Yeah, it’s about alternative cultures in America. It’s been really challenging because the kind of books I write could extend forever. If you’re writing a narrative about a battle like Black Hawk Down, or a legal case, there’s a beginning, middle, and end, but these ideas sort of sprawl infinitely, so the challenge is finding where to end. If you’re also really obsessed with reporting you could just keep going forever, basically holding a mirror back at life and not writing a very good book.

RK: What personal experiences, if any, have you had with explicit or implicit sexism in your line of work?

AQ: It’s been a more insidious kind of thing. It’s not said, but in some ways is worse, like, you won’t be taken seriously or you’ll be seen as “too young.” I was seen as “too young” for a long time, and I think that’s because I was a young woman—I wonder if I had been young man if I would have been seen as a protégé in the making. Older men see themselves in younger men sometimes—and that’s more the level where I see sexism, where young women aren’t chosen as the “successor” they just aren’t seen that way. I also talk to my female students who don’t want to embarrass themselves by being aggressive about jobs, or even reporting. The conventional thinking is “oh, women are afraid to be pushy,” but there’s just less encouragement for young women out there to be “push” or to be writing opinion pieces and the rest at all.

Democracy 911

Democracy and Civil Engagement Retreat

Presented by the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership

February 18-21st, 2010; Ancramdale, NY

Most U.S. citizens, even those with the most to offer as citizen leaders, know very little about how this country works and what they can do to make it better.  In a long weekend, a team of professionals will lead a true non-partisan “Democracy 911” retreat.  Retreatants will receive a core grounding in the principles of the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as a refresher on the separation of powers.

Speakers Include: Shahid Buttar, Catherine Orenstein, Jacquette Timmons, Naomi Wolf, Wende Jager-Hyman, Matthis Chiroux and Karla Jackson-Brewer

Cost: $395 plus $200 lodging, totaling $595.

Limited scholarships are available.

Contact Laura Sinkman at LSinkman@woodhull.org and at 646-435-0837. Or for more information or to register: http://www.woodhull.org/pageView.php?id=5

FAITH. Despite the Robertsons of the world.

We love Connie Schultz’s piece in the Plain Dealer, refuting Pat Robertson’s take on the situation in Haiti.

If you too think it’s preposterous to say that Haitians made a pact with the devil, you’ll like it too!

Drowning out Pat Robertson’s Message of Hate on Haiti with Voices of Faith in Our common humanity By: Connie Schultz

Do we let ourselves off too easily?

There is a hidden cost to tweeting, texting, and other “convenient” ways of taking action to help others.

In her American Prospect piece, OEP Alum and Mentor-Editor, Courtney Martin writes about the nature of our response to the recent tragedy in Haiti.

The Missing Discomfort in Mourning for Haiti

As the saying goes: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” It shouldn’t take a natural disaster of this magnitude to get our attention. Just as Katrina shined an undeniable light on economic disparity and institutional racism in this country, Haiti’s most recent earthquake is illuminating a similarly inexcusable disparity on a global scale.  Read Full Article

Thinking About Haiti

As some of you may know, we at The OpEd Project have a special connection to Haiti. Our Founder Katie Orenstein lived and worked there in the 90′s (here’s a couple of her articles that give a good idea of the political landscape then (and still): Aristide Again and Fantasy Island: Royal Caribbean parcels off a piece of Haiti) and Director of Operations, Danielle Warren (that’s me) is the treasurer of One Village Planet–a non-profit that has been doing reforestation and public works projects in there for the last ten years. Our thoughts go out to all those effected by this tragic event.

Please take a moment to read OEP alum, Gina Athena Ulysse’s beautiful piece–on finding hope amid the rubble.

In Solidarity,

Katie and Danielle