Steven Arnerich is from San Francisco, but has been away so long he can also say he is “from New York City.” His kids were born here. Steven studied English, electronic music, and philosophy in college. A graphic designer by profession, Steven works on printed matter for The New School. He has also designed and built furniture, welded nuclear reactor control rooms, driven a truck, painted signs, played music and so on. Arnerich thinks, essential as it is to “learn something new every day,” it’s perhaps more important to change one’s mind about something every day. He’d give his right arm to be ambidextrous, and he helps to design The Indypendent when he can.

Bennett Baumer writes on labor-relations, economic policy, tenant issues, immigration and cultural pieces. He has been a student-labor organizer and currently works as a tenant organizer in New York City. He also has written for City Limits magazine, New Standard News and Labor Notes. He is the winner of two Independent Press Association Awards for his labor reporting. He is married to Amy Wolf, whom he met as an Indypendent volunteer.

Mike Burke is a news producer at the radio/TV news program Democracy Now! Mike helped start The Indypendent in 2000 and is now a contributing editor and writer at the paper. He lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Ellen Davidson makes her living as an editor at Fashion Institute of Technology. Her previous experience with radical publications includes The (New York) Guardian, where she worked for 11 years doing everything from production to editing to running the business department; Lies of Our Times, a media-analysis monthly; and CovertAction Quarterly. She currently works with the War Resisters League (www.warresisters.org). In her nonexistent spare time, she bikes everywhere and sings everything from classical to jazz to political music from many cultures, especially with the vocal ensemble Harmonic Insurgence. At The Indypendent, she focuses on administrative work, managing the subscriber list and helping with promotion and fundraising. She also contributes her copyediting skills, being one of the few people left on the planet who knows what a semicolon is and when it should be used. She housed the newspaper’s operations in Lower East Side apartment for five months in 2005-06, and her cats Countess and Cleofis consider themselves members of the Indypendent staff.

Ryan Dunsmuir has been designing The Indypendent since 2003, after leaving California behind. She has won design awards from the New York Community Media Alliance in 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008. She loves hiking amidst Patagonian glaciers, writing 50,000 word novels every November (and then burning them) and watching old Jean-Paul Belmondo movies. She survives on various freelance design gigs. Visit her website at www.conqueso.com.

Anna Gold joined The Indypendent in March 2007. Uncoincidentally, The Indypendent won the Best Overall Design award from the New York Community Media Alliance in 2007 and 2008. Anna lives in a sweet apartment in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, where she embarks on various brilliant and ambitious design and video projects. She enjoys reading books mostly to the end, having enthusiastic conversations, and yoga. Anna blogs about lefty design (and other topics) at www.leftpalate.com.

A native New Yorker, Samantha Gorelick received a BA in environmental studies from Bard College in 2004. She later went to live and volunteer in Chiapas, México, for a time, where she received an informal education in radicalism. Upon her return to New York, Gorelick found her way to The Indypendent in November of 2006, where she has been a volunteer ever since. A former graduate student of social ecology, Gorelick manages The Indypendent’s website with great enthusiasm, and daydreams about topics such as food, books and a utopian society in her spare time.

A founding editor of The Indypendent, Arun Gupta writes about energy, the economy, the media, U.S. foreign policy, the politics of food and other subjects for The Indypendent, Z Magazine, Left Turn and Alternet. Gupta is a regular commentator on Democracy Now! and GritTV with Laura Flanders. He’s writing a book on the decline of American Empire to be published by Haymarket Books. From 1989 to 1992 he was an international news editor at the Guardian Newsweekly.

Mary Annaise Heglar is a 2006 Oberlin College graduate and an Alassippian at heart (meaning she was born in Alabama and raised between there and Mississippi). She moved to New York City in August 2006 and has since become obsessed with the Bronx, where she currently lives and works. She is a proud member of the South Bronx Food Co-op and works at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She helps out with production and occassional distribution and writing with The Indypendent.

Irina Ivanova joined The Indypendent as an intern during the summer of 2004 New York Republican National Convention, and has since contributed local features, photography, book and film reviews and the occassional house party. After graduating Amherst College and realizing all her friends were involved with The Indypendent, Irina moved to New York to pursue revolutionary media full-time. She currently helps edit The Indypendent’s culture section and is excited to be a part of the Indy Video team. She loves to spend her nights baking.

Alex Kane is currently attending Marymount Manhattan College where he is pursuing a B.A. in political science as well as two minors in Sociology and international relations. He walked into The Indypendent in September 2007 with absolutely no clue what he was getting himself into and now has fallen in love with the newspaper. He writes for The Indypendent on various issues, including privatization of public parks, homelessness in New York City, third party candidates and other topics. He is also an administrator at the New York City Independent Media Center’s open-publishing website, nyc.indymedia.org. In his spare time he enjoys playing drums, listening to hip-hop, jazz, ska and everything else and being an avid news junkie.

Jessica Lee opted to trade saguaro cacti for sky scrapers when she moved to New York City from the beautiful Sonoran Desert in January 2007. She currently serves as the general coordinator of The Indypendent. She loves to report in her spare time, which these days, isn’t much. If you find the newspaper in Brooklyn, it was likely she was the one who delivered it. She currently helps lead The Indypendent’s “Basic Journalism” reporting workshop series. In 2007, her investigative reporting of the pending Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act won an award with Project Censored, as a top story not covered by the mainstream media. She was also awarded 3rd Place in Investigative Reporting for the article from the New York Community Media Alliance in 2008. While at the University of Arizona studying environmental science and policy, she fell in love with newspapers after working at the Arizona Daily Wildcat for almost four years as a columnist, editor, reader advocate, and science news reporter. During college, she was awarded the 2004 Best News Story by the Arizona Newspapers Association and the 2002 College Columnist of the year by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Before moving to New York City, she volunteered with Arizona Independent Media (”Indymedia”) Center from 2004 to 2006, covering environmental and border news and worked on developing a citizen journalism workshop. She is working on being compassionate and mindful and wishes there was more by-donation-only yoga centers. She loves the “deep humanity” of New York City, but is an outdoorsy woman at heart. She can be caught day dreaming of hiking through the desert at sunrise or floating down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Jaisal Noor is a Brooklyn-based multimedia journalist.  Along with being a regular contributor to The Indypendent Newspaper and Indyblog, Jaisal reports for Free Speech Radio News and Community News Production Institute. Jaisal works as production assistant for the daily TV/Radio show Democracy Now! and leads museum tours for student groups.

Frank Reynoso is a native New Yorker and Brooklyn-based freelance illustrator. His work has appeared in publications including Clamor, Left Turn, Z Magazine and Impact Press. He has been with The Indypendent since December 2003 working as a staff illustrator and Art Coordinator. You can see more of Frank’s art at www.freynosoart.blogspot.com.

John Tarleton is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism who covered news and sports for several daily papers. A pioneer in online citizen journalism, he launched cybertraveler.org/johntarleton.net in 1994. Reporting from the remotest parts of El Salvador, Chiapas and Oaxaca to the back alleys of Morocco to the Battle of Seattle to September 11th, he steadily built an audience of thousands as he hitchhiked 75,000 miles in 17 countries while surviving on money he made as a migrant farm worker and tree planter. Tarleton participated in a number of Indymedia Centers from 1999-2001 before joining The Indypendent as a writer, editor and organizer in 2001. He won 1st Place for Best Feature from the New York Community Media Alliance of New York in 2003 and 2005 and helped guide The Indypendent as it garnered more awards for excellence in community journalism, than any other paper in the city in five out of the past six years. He also built the paper’s citywide distribution network. Since 2001, he has assisted with the initial development of El Independiente, Riseup Radio (WBAI - 99.5 FM’s youth activism show) and IndyKids, as well as Indymedia newspapers in San Francisco, Boston and Binghamton, N.Y. and founded The Indypendent’s Community Reporting Workshop Series which has trained more than 300 citizen journalists. He served as The Indypendent’s coordinator for more than six years and in 2009 stepped down to become an Assistant Editor at The Clarion.

Erin Thompson began volunteering in September 2005 with The New York City Independent Media Center, where she has worked as editor, writer and coordinator for The Indypendent. In 2007 she took on coordinating IndyKids, the current-events newspaper for kids. She also co-coordinates The Indypendent’s “Basic Journalism” reporting workshop and is developing a media bias workshop curriculum to be used in elementary and middle school classrooms. For more about IndyKids, visit www.indykids.net.

Eric Volpe is a midtown office worker (rail operations analyst) who several years ago started to suspect that he wasn’t getting the full story of what’s happening in the world from the corporate media when events that seemed newsworthy to him didn’t get reported. Impressed to find out that there were people who were taking it upon themselves to report the news, he decided that this was something that needed to be helped and encouraged. Starting out as “just” a subscriber, he took an Indypendent-sponsored reporting workshop, and now assists with newspaper distribution, and has done a bit of writing as well.

Amy Wolf is a New York-based activist whose skills include videography, media outreach, design, message development and film production. She is currently the coordinator of Indy Video, the video team of the New York City Independent Media Center that produces content for Manhattan public-access television. She has worked for organizations including The Interfaith Alliance, Fund for Public Interest Research and The Metropolitan Council on Housing and is currently the Communications Officer at the New York Community Trust. She has written for The Indypendent and for Avantoure magazine. Her other work for the New York Independent Media Center spans writing, fundraising, design and distribution.

Eleanor Bader

Eleanor J. Bader is a teacher, activist and freelance writer from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Her work frequently appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The L Magazine, Library Journal, Z Magazine and on rhrealitycheck.org and ontheissues.com.

Charlie Bass

Writer, student, teacher, director, Charlie Bass once listed his ideal profession (in one of those silly-ass email forward things) as teaching film theory to a room full of pugs. Until said pugs encounter the monolith from 2001 and make an awfully cute evolutionary leap, Bass will be content having taught film acting history, directing various short films, and writing film reviews for The Indypendent. Bass received his Masters in Media Studies and Film from the New School in May 2006 and fell into a deep well of debt moments later. Unless he’s stinking drunk, you would never guess Charlie was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

Donald Paneth

Donald Paneth is a former reporter for The New York Times who has covered the United Nations, worked for the U.N. Secretariat, and contributed to other books about the U.N. since 1945. Paneth has been the U.N. correspondent for The Indypendent since 2002. He is also the author of The Encyclopedia of American Journalism (1983).

Nicholas Powers

Nicholas Powers is a writer and teacher. He contributes to The Indypendent, the Village Voice and is the author of the poetry book Theater of War published by Upset Press. He is Ph. D graduate of the City College of New York who’s thesis was titled, “The Undertow of Reason: Redefining the Sublime Through the Middle Passage.”

Steven Wishnia

Steven Wishnia covers housing and drug-policy issues, writes the A-String music column, and occasionally rants about civil liberties and election campaigns. He has received two New York Community Media Alliance “Ippie” awards for his work with The Indypendent. He was formerly news editor at High Times and since 1995 has edited Tenant, the newspaper of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, New York City’s leading tenants-rights organization. His work has also appeared in the Village Voice, The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, City Limits, and the late Guardian newsweekly, where he was an editor. He also writes regularly for Alternet.org, where he enjoys annoying racists and conspiracy nuts.

He is the author of the punk-rock short-story set Exit 25 Utopia (The Imaginary Press), The Cannabis Companion (The Running Press), and is working on a novel entitled Very Bad When Drumming Stops. He was bassist and cofounder of the False Prophets, New York’s leading leftist-punk band of the 1980s, and continues to play out regularly. He currently plays guitar and sax in a revived False Prophets, double bass in a klezmer band, and bass in the Improvised Explosive Devices, the group that does the music for multimedia shows by radical artists Seth Tobocman and Mac McGill.

Antrim Caskey

Brooklyn-based independent photojournalist, Antrim Caskey, 38, began working with photography in 1993, in Southwest China. Caskey studied photography at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, Palm Beach Photographic Center in Florida and the International Center of Photography in New York City. Caskey lived and worked in India (1997-98) where she began her freelance career with the Indian Express and the Hindu. Caskey arrived in New York City at the end of 1998. She worked at the New York Times Magazine in the Art Department for several years and then left to go freelance in 2002. In 2003, Caskey was awarded a Pew International Journalism fellowship to study at Johns Hopkins, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and then to go to Argentina on a six week reporting trip to report on the human costs of Argentina’s unprecedented economic collapse of 2002. See the video she produced here. In May 2005, at the offices of New York’s The Indypendent, Antrim encountered Maria Gunnoe for the first time. After this initial meeting, Caskey traveled to see Gunnoe three days later. With this began work on the story of how the mountaintop removal coal mining is obliterating the oldest mountain range in the nation and slowly killing off the people who have lived on these lands for a dozen decades. Published pieces appeared in Orion magazine, the Boston Globe, AlterNet, Blue Ridge Country, the Washingtonian, Doubletake, The Indypendent, Grist.org, Clamor and the Columbia Journalism Review. In August 2005, Antrim traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan to cover the nation’s first Parliamentary elections. The majority of the year 2007 and into 2008 have centered on reporting from the coalfields of southern West Virginia. Caskey has moved to live and work in field full time; she currently resides in Rock Creek, West Virginia, in the Coal River Valley.

Andrew Stern

Andrew Stern is a photojournalist committed to documenting critical social and political issues. His compelling imagery has been recognized for the intimate relationship he develops with his subjects, as well as the time he spends to immerse himself in a story. He has photographed in over 20 countries and his award winning work regularly appears in The Indypendent as well as The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Readers Digest, Harper’s, the New York Times, Internationale, Die Welt, La Jornada and many other publications both domestically and internationally. He is also co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (Verso, 2003).

Nicholas Allanach

Nicholas Allanach is an artist and writer living in New York City. He recently graduated from the New School for Social Research and currently works at the New School for General Studies. Nicholas has had illustrations in The Indypendent, MeThree, Canon and Words and Images. He is currently developing a comic book called New World. Visit his blo, www.newworld1.blogspot.com.

Jeff Faerber

Jeff Faerber’s art has appeared in magazines, books, CDs, websites and galleries. He grew up in California and studied art at San José State University (San José, CA) and School of Visual Arts (NYC). He currently lives in Brooklyn with two cats. Please see his website, www.jefffaerber.com.

Leo Garcia

Leo Garcia, an editorial illustrator, is a graduate of Parsons School of Design. He works on both comical and serious illustration that exposes injustice and evokes social change.

David Hollenbach

David Hollenbach has been known to make illustrations for The Indypendent. He is the irresponsible person responsible for the “An Army of None” cover illustration on issue #78. David Hollenbach is a native of Salisbury, Maryland, home of poultry magnate, Frank Perdue. After high school, David moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he studied illustration at Pratt Institute. He received his B.F.A. in 1998. David is now working as a freelance illustrator in the borough of Queens. He also has been a fairly lucky blackjack table novice in Atlantic City.

Gary Martin

A politically minded cartoon artist, Gary Martin has contributed to The Indypendent, IndyKids and NewPolitics and is the author of 2 collections of drawings; “The New Leisure Class” & “Sects in the City”. His work can be seen at www.antisocialstudies.com.