CREATE, INSPIRE, BLOG PANEL

Why is Brooklyn such a hotbed of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit? That will be the topic of this year’s Blogfest panel. Moderated by Andrea Bernstein, the panelists will include Brooklyn bloggers and creative entrepreneurs who will discuss why Brooklyn is such a rich source of inspiration and material for them.

  

 

Aaward-winning journalist Andrea Bernstein heads up coverage of transportation, urban planning, infrastructure and sustainability at WNYC. As Director of the public radio Transportation Nation project, Bernstein works with Marketplace, The Takeaway and seven public radio stations across the country to deepen their coverage of these issues.

In 2007 and 2008, as Political Director, Bernstein covered the Presidential election from the primaries through the debates to election night, culminating her work in the Takeaway series "Counties that Count," which focused on voter attitudes and opinions in eleven key swing counties across America.

 

Bernstein joined the WNYC news staff in 1998. She’s covered government and politics for over a decade, and has at various points been assigned to Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, and Charles Schumer. She’s also covered rebuilding at the World Trade Center Site and the campaign for the 2012 Olympics.

 

Bernstein was one of twelve U.S. Journalists to win a prestigious 2007 Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She has won over three dozen team and individual awards for her work, including the Investigative Reporters and Editors award for radio, the National Press Club award for environmental reporting, and national Murrow and Society for Professional Journalists awards for investigative reporting. In 2009, she became a Hoover Media Fellow.

 

She was political correspondent for The New York Observer for eight years, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Newsday, The Daily News, The Nation, and Salon.com.

Bernstein is an occasional guest-host on The Brian Lehrer Show and The Takeaway.

 

She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two children.

 

Heather Johnston: chef, wine professional, mother, wife, indie filmmaker and founder of sogood.tv, a video blog about food and wine for the home cook.

 

Atiba T. Edwards grew up in Brownsville, BK after migrating from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. He is the co-founder and president of the arts not-for-profit F.O.K.U.S. Inc.; co creator of Visual Stenographers, a digital photo album and creator of Fresh Industries. Atiba is a perpetual dreamer who prefers to do art in the dark with his eyes open.

Faye Penn: editor of Brokleyn.com: Living Big on Small Change, a site offering tips for how to live, play, shop, and eat well in budget-friendly Brooklyn

Jake Dobkin, Park Slope, Brooklyn, native and publisher of the very popular, Gothamist, a blog about New York that pulls a majority (40%) of its readers from Brooklyn

Sophia Romero blogs as The Shiksa from Manila. She is the author of the novel, Always Hiding.

The inspiration of Brooklyn: What is it about it here that fans creative fires? Do you have to be born and bred in Brooklyn or is it a state of mind?

 

How does Brooklyn’s rich diversity fuel creativity? Is this something new or has it always been this way?

 

Why does Brooklyn loom large in the national (and international) imagination?

 

How would you describe the creative tension between Manhattan and Brooklyn? Does Manhattan's creative energy rub off on Brooklyn? OR is Brooklyn now siphoning off the Manhattan’s best and brightest as innovators, artists, and creators flee the increasingly homogenous environment (and big box-store haven) Manhattan has become? 

 

How does gentrification affect creativity? Does it spur or stifle this dynamic force?

 

How did Brooklyn come to earn the moniker " bloggiest borough"?

 

Living as we do in an increasingly global culture, are we attracted to neighborhood-themed blogs as a way to experience small-town life?

 

How do blogs contribute to a culture of creativity? I.E. If bloggers weren’t ferreting out what’s most unique, exciting, distinctive, controversial, and transcendent about Brooklyn, would it seem more ordinary? 

 

How does being able to blog fuel the creativity of bloggers and those who follow them?

 

Would this creative explosion be possible without blogs giving the big shout outs.

 

What comes first: the blog or the business? For many people blogs have been career changers. But increasingly established businesses are turning to blogging in order to extend their brand. Thoughts?