Scarsdale Grad Advocates for Free Speech

Eric ThurmSHS grad Eric Thurm is working at an organization that’s near and dear to our hearts. It is called Free Press – not to be confused with “The Free Press” founded by Bari Weiss.

Free Press was founded in 2003 to protect free speech and press freedom, fight hate and misinformation, achieve affordable internet access for all, and advance racial equity in media.

How to achieve these goals?

We asked Thurm to tell us about himself and to explain the work of the Free Press and his role at the organization.

Here is what he shared:

I graduated SHS in 2010 and did undergrad at the University of Chicago. For several years after graduating, I worked as a critic and journalist, writing about TV, film, books, and internet culture for outlets like Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Baffler, and GQ. At the same time, I founded and ran a literary-comedy hybrid event called Drunk TED Talks, which was exactly what it sounds like — comedians, MacArthur Genius Grant winners, academics, and more, talking about topics ranging from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to Carly Rae Jepsen. I also wrote a book about board games, which was published by NYU Press as part of the Avidly Reads series. For the past couple of years before starting at Free Press, I worked as a story editor on the Wondery podcast Scamfluencers and oversaw state and municipal legislative campaigns for the National Writers Union, including the passage of state laws in New York, California, and Illinois securing workplace protections for freelancers.

Free Press is a nonprofit that's been around since 2003, advocating for an improved and more just media. We're funded through a mix of grants from foundations and individual donors.

Our work covers several different issue areas like Net Neutrality, First Amendment protections and free speech, and combating consolidation across media. There are a number of different initiatives and projects within those areas, including several that I'm still learning about myself!

The National Writers Union, which I'm a member of and where I'd been coordinating state legislative campaigns, has collaborated with Free Press on a couple of different projects, so this was a very natural extension of that work.

My job title is "Civic Media Campaign Manager," which essentially means I support and execute efforts to get states to pass strong policy around local news and community information. Our goal is getting states to invest in local news—especially in communities that are in news deserts, or that have been historically underserved by media—as well as other ways for people to get crucial information.

This approach primarily takes after New Jersey's Civic Info Consortium, which has been able to provide millions of dollars in direct grants to newsrooms across the state while maintaining a strong firewall between elected officials and editorial decisions. NJCIC has been able to support more journalism focused on local government in New Jersey, local news in places like Atlantic City, and Spanish-language news for immigrant communities that often lack accessible news. Pennsylvania recently advanced a pair of bills out of committee that would create a similar state Civic Info Consortium and a fellowship program to support early and mid-career journalists, and we're working on campaigns in several other states. (Here's our press statement on the PA bills.)
If readers want to help support independent reporting, I would encourage them to get involved in our anti-censorship work! There are lots of opportunities for people to make their voices heard, whether that's by telling the FCC to stop engaging in political bullying or by supporting broader coalitions and events we're participating in … like this rally our co-chief executive recently spoke at with Jane Fonda.