Farai Chideya: the multimedia journalist talks about the digital media age and why she still believes in the power of journalism.(Q & A)(Interview)

The online publication you founded 12 years ago, Pop and Politics (www.popandpolitics.com), is an elder on the Internet. How has it evolved over the years? One of the things that we've consistently done is to reach people in their twenties and teens. It's a place for people to really cut their teeth in the world of digital media ... Now we've become university-based at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. We have a whole training component ... But it's not enough to say, "We're going to give people news information." You have to prep them, give them a foundation, so that when they get to voting age they actually have a vested interest in the news culture.

NPR has recently been increasing efforts to attract younger viewers, a demographic where it has traditionally struggled. Is attracting younger viewers a focus of your work at News and Notes, your first stint as a national public radio host? Yeah, it's funny because that's not what we were asked to do. We got one of the best fan letters where this woman said, "I'm 34, and I love you guys because you're young but you're not Britneyfied." What that fan was saying was, "You speak to me as someone who is in my thirties without doing it in a way that's patronizing."

Do you think multimedia journalism culture is progress? For me it always has to be about journalism in the public interest, and freedom of choice and expression within the context of building a society that works ... It's not "is online journalism good or bad?" but "does it fulfill the basic need of journalists to shake things up and be truthtellers?" Multimedia journalism is evolving constantly.

What keeps you optimistic about the power of journalism to impact people's lives? People really do want information. Journalism is not the endgame, it's the beginning. If we have good journalism, what else can we have? We can have good citizenship. We can have the potential for social change.

With the 2008 election on the horizon, what are some of the important questions journalists should be raising? We need to really take a look at what we consider truthtelling. In looking back at the 2000 elections and the major tax cuts that followed, there was some critique that said, "People never should have thought that you could have a tax cut without deficits." Part of journalism is being fair ...