just met what about four or five days ago so i'm really happy to have him here i'm going to start off by reading a little bit of his bio just a kind of give you a sense of who he is the two sort of values that he selected are community and family and he has reported all over the city of new york its surrounding areas as well as out into the continental u s and overseas for news organizations both big and small he is currently the executive producer of an international current affairs show that is broadcast on and on an ethnic cable channel and arrows all across the united states and canada in addition he is passionate about local news which one of those is one of the kind of things the kind of brought us together that affects the areas where he lives as a freelancer his by lions have appeared in various local news organizations across new jersey he also mentor students from local colleges who aspire to work in journalism and media and helps them to grow as professionals and adults he grew up in brooklyn new york but has come to call the state of new jersey his home for the past five years or so  having me it's a real pleasure to be here with you absolute i'm hoping that everybody enjoys our conversation particularly because i know it's a mouthful to go over all things that i have that i've done but you know it's very hard to body kind of  sore values you know it was very difficult for me to select the sort of values because there were really a lot of good ones that you know only to me why those in particular because those are the two that are most relevant to me right now so you know you did say how we met and just to give our audience a little bit of background and you know and i have met recently when we were down in trenton talking about the civic information bill that is currently under review by the legislation on the state of new jersey to try to allow like our viewers to try to allow them to be more informed about what's going on both in their communities as well as what's going on the legislature were things that are being considered issues that affect them directly and when you look at that obviously many people can look and see that the media industry struggling right now they're struggling a lot and i know some very good journalists who have worked here in new jersey and in new york as well who have either moved on so the jobs have left the industry altogether because of how unreliable it is and others who struggle to make a living and struggle to have families and things like that many actually have second jobs in addition to what they do during their day jobs and in order just to help pay those bills so it's kind of creating a vacuum indeed indeed i think that purpose of that civic unfold bill we can talk about a little bit later but going back to the sort values obviously i did pick community engagement and and creativity and i think based on the you gave our viewers today the idea that journalism itself and local journalism which is what i've been passionate about over probably the last two years or so has been creativity that's what it is telling stories i know you've mentioned to be in the past conversations that we've had prior to this show that your idea of having the show is to tell stories of people in the local community yes it's the same for me i do journalism because i want to tell those stories from our local communities from the people that it affects  and one of the things that i was able to to work with them on is going to the local city council meetings as was the community board meetings and really getting an idea of how residents feel about the new development is being built in new brunswick oh and yeah there's a new development where they are actually moving the state theatre and they're rebuilding that whole area behind at the door she explained how yeah yeah yeah and so see i wasn't aware of that right and we get to interact directly with both the city administration as well as the developers who are planning to build these things and also using the platform to share that with the residents of new brunswick who maybe are working people who are not able to come to these meetings and we also are able  to film those things on video and then provide those for people to watch as well so i've been lucky to be involved and that essence of it and to me that's important it's important i mean really to know what's going on and its own backyard  you know we live in interesting times right now where there's a lot of controversy and there's a lot of political turmoil going around regardless of which side you choose to tell yourself whether thing there's definitely a lot of uncertainty and how the future is going to be and i think that is all the more important to have a kind of a local voice and not just a local voice that that is just able to you know give you the cut and dry crime stories that everybody real time but yeah but the important stuff you know where we're the road closures where's maybe there was a gas leak that happened maybe there's some kind of a pothole one of the countability who's doing what on on  which of your local areas you know i always tell people this the present united states is somebody who people come out elect every four years and lot of people come out to vote for that but few people know their local elected officials or representatives they the turnouts for those actions are usually very low yes and i think that's because a lot of people don't really understand the impact that local elected officials have on a community the amount of things that that the president ited states will either execute into law or congress or into law that affect our daily lives sure there are large things health care is a very big issue being talked about right now however when you look at it yes health care does affect people but overall other things especially things that are overseas really don't affect our daily lives our daily lives we go to work we come back and work we go grocery shopping pick up the kids from daycare doesn't really affect us as much on a daily basis but what our local elected officials do does affect us because they serve as a conduit right there absolutely is there going to be that stop sign that's on the corner that's going to allow your kids to cross safely from from their school as they're coming back home from school maybe there needs to be a change in the way the road is done because there's a lot of congestion going on that's all local administration those are all people that we also elect to represent us that are going to be making these crucial decisions which will affect our daily life in all fact you're commuting how you get to work every day because the road is going to be less congested exactly so these are things that affect people on every day basis and to me i'm passionate about being able to share that information and have the people there are my neighbors essentially be as informed and as involved in this as i am and so that's that's because i'm originally not from this area i was born and raised in pittsburgh pennsylvania so when i moved to and incidentally the town that i grew up in is actually a  suburb pensive of pittsburgh's i don't actually live in the city proper and so the tell that i live in now the city of trenton reminds me very much of the hometown that i grew up in and one of the things that i found particularly interesting when i moved here because now i'm an outsider so to speak and have a very different sort of view and one of the things that was apparent to me very early on is that there are so many things that go on in the city of trenton at the community level at the grassroots level but if you pick up the newspaper you wouldn't know any of that so for me that was that was that was pretty much a startling revelation to be perfectly honest with you because here i am i'm involved in a community i'm doing this and i'm teaching at young scholars and i'm doing you know things in my kids school and all of that so here's is treasure trove of stuff that's going on but when you pick up the newspaper you don't see any of that you just see the bad reputation and all the other things that are associated with cities such as such as trenton so for may that was one of the that was pretty much an eye opener and that is one of the things that prompted me to come to the the lobbying day that we had the other day so you know it's interesting i'm also i guess in the house side are you going to jersey i grew up in brooklyn which is a very different world being in a very urban area where there's lots of saturation of people living there is just a mess i mean you're you can walk everywhere there's a lot of public transportation and that kind of set me were you know unlike a lot of youngsters who grow up living in the suburbs where they're they don't really go anywhere by themselves me at fourteen fifteen sixteen years old i was taking the subway and and travelling the streets of new york so there was a lot more independence as you're growing up so that gave me a lot of freedom to explore and to really understand how the world operates and new york city is you know one of the biggest cities in the world being able to be on that kind of playground was was amazing experience growing up  but i've also had the luck the pleasure of working and various elements of the media industry over the past ten years i've seen the evolution rather i guess it would be a delusion because it's you see things disappear you see people you work with one day next day or out of a job or they moved on to something else into my public relations or marketing and even though they're phenomenal at what they do they're not able to sustain themselves they're not able to sustain themselves their families are able to sustain themselves if they have certain aspirations of growth and they have a ceiling and so these sorts look for other opportunities out there and unfortunately the losers of that are us our society we're the ones who lose when those people aren't there doing those jobs i happen to be under the impression that a lot of people misunderstand not only  the purpose of journalism and local journalism and not only the purpose of having somebody tell local stories that affect us but more specifically how it's done a lot of people don't understand that it's a lot of work to go out there and to do it accurately and to do it quickly and unfortunately i mean this is a very common situation where people say look the internet the internet ruined everything yeah it also created opportunities yeah it is always so is a two way street but i think one of the things that we lost with the internet is the appreciation of the value of information and that goes beyond the internet that goes into our social institutions i think that goes back to our education where there is not a lot of emphasis on how much value information holds in education and i think that is that those are failures of our education system those are failures of of our society's inability to do that higher education as well i think higher education is definitely not where it was even twenty years ago there's a lot more money going around and higher education but that the money that gets exchanged doesn't have the same value did i would completely agree with everything that  oh you think about the internet like my background is in research so i grew up like going to the library and finding like i'm one of those people the micro film and all of that like more of the old school way of gathering information and so for me when i first started getting connected to the internet i thought it was great but also it was great for me because i know as a researcher i know how to synthesize information and know how to find the patterns and information but i think when you're just bombarded with information and you you're just getting it this constant influx of information my perspective is that people you lose the ability to critically think about the information that they're getting and now you just have your head just full of information but you're not necessarily making the right connections with all of that information well you dale that i mean information is always out there whether again yesterday that were in books or  documentaries or in t v shows i mean yes when when i grew up internet was a little slower a little bit more you know not the same as it is now but we still had documentaries and television that i have watched all the time and i was a big proponent of nontraditional ways of educating yourself not just sitting in a classroom because that doesn't work for everybody let's be honest but being able to watch a documentary being able to maybe see a movie that is that is educational that has educational moments to it i think if you the creator of the show for being able to bridge that gap but there's a reason for it his father is an immigrant who came here and who can appreciate the kind of world that that the opportunities that it gives you but his father was  also a person who's an activist who was working in various administrations in new york city and so and his mother i believe was a teacher so his upbringing was about educating people yes and he happened to link that to his love of art and hip hop and and be able to draw those distinctions i mean how many people can sit with a biography of the book hamilton and say wow this really has a parallel to the hip hop f yeah yeah yeah that's an abstract way of looking at it but he was able to turn that and now i'm looking at young kids in grade schools who get to go to this show who are singing songs from the show while they're doing all the stuff they're learning they're learning about the history of our country they're learning about what the founding fathers were doing and it also allows people to visualize things that they often can't so most of us in history class we know what it's like blog yeah it's a bunch of old white dead guys who are there and they're always in this idealism that exists all across the history books and it says deeds and everything like that one of the reasons i enjoyed nontraditional ways of learning about it is because it gave me other perspectives on yes saving the how often does these were flawed people these were scared people they had no idea what they were doing when they became own country they didn't know some things were going to work they didn't know some things were going to work and that's great that that adds an element to it that we often don't see that it's not fully pre determined that that things  can and should be discussed and in the public sphere and i think it teaches a lot of really great elements but that's one of the ways of bringing that creativity together with with what you can do for the community one of the ways that you can give back is to do creative things that also can then benefit the larger the public at large absolutely so why don't we sift a little bit and tell our audience a little bit more about you on a personal level like how did you get into journalism what was your path in life the kind of led to this where you are now gee i had no choice but if we're really honest about it my father i'm actually a third generation visual storyteller my grandfather started photography when he was young i grandfather was in the military and you know full disclosure i'm an immigrant i came here when i was nine years old from ukraine and my grandfather served in the military has al as an engineer and there's a obviously a long story that we really don't have time for yes that's linked to you know the answer some of his windows system is the former soviet union that prevented people particularly lose from going into  creative fields so they had to do their creativity on the side while they were doing more technical things with their work so my grandfather was an engineer because that was something that he would be given the opportunity to do but his creative side was always visual storytelling through photography and so i don't read father started saw graffiti and first it was amateur photography that that then turned more serious when people started calling him to start taking photos of them and maybe going  shooting some of vents that were going on then and so we have this large trove of photography from my grandfather's time just sitting in albums of very well i and my dad took it a step further he not only he also  engineering but he took photography into filmmaking so moving pictures now and he started with film which then took towards the later end of the eighty's and ninety's evolved into video and television broadcasting and that's where my dad sort of ended up going is being in television engineering and later on becoming a camera man and then later a producer as well and so i grew up around the stuff i grew up around so that's i grew up around journalists i grew up around  people who inform the larger community so i could see that from a young age from nine ten when i first started going around with my father and seeing it firsthand and it kind of started rubbing off on me and even art of course so that that too and then also i looked up to a couple of t v people who i used to watch on t v growing up in new york who were reporters and you know whenever any projects came up writing like that where i got to pretend be a reporter that was exciting for me so i think it was there from in early age but i think in high school was when i really focused myself a story i tell everybody i came to my father and i said you know dad i really want to go into journalism and this is an excellent lesson for anybody who's interested in it he said just do it just just go out there and do it and you know that gave me the right push i started writing for my school newspaper i started doing a lot of different things that grew very quickly and from there it just kind of evolved where i kept doing things and i kept working and it there's been a rocky path but nonetheless my passion for it is still there you know i don't have the same feelings when i when i'm going in to doing interviews or writing the story and i also enjoy playing with language and creative side of me and enjoys  ago that the best way to position yourself for success is to be able to learn all aspects yes to really be flexible to do anything at any time and that's opened a lot of really interesting opportunities over the years and to also mention i mentor some college students who i've met and those are the things that i try to impress on them these are students who do want to go into the business look they're going to have a lot of time in their future to figure out that this is a challenging field yes and to figure out that there's going to be a lot of negative associated with it but what i try to do is be an interesting analogy but infect them with that  narrative understanding people coming up to somebody random and asking them a question and really trying to understand where that person comes from those things are priceless and it's security also it's security of our society i mean i look at it as not only my mentoring these kids to do this but also it's a way to ensure that the next generation of storytellers is going to be there you know obviously we all grow  older and you want to make wiser and wiser to yeah but if you want to you want to ensure that the next generation isn't lost and so if you know shirts maybe a handful of them but if this handful of young people grow up to be successful in this field and i was instrumental in helping them get there then i think that that's a good accomplishment and i feel like that would be appropriate for me to give back to society good good so i want to make sure you have the chance to touch on your radio show is  i get to be very instrumental in producing the show and what's interesting about the show that we do it's international but it's local and here's what i mean there's a large community here in new york greater new york city area that includes large swaths of new jersey of people who are either of russian descent or are immigrants themselves who have found success here and we try to do is give them that world view so given that their daily life might involve living here in the u s they might not see world events from other perspectives so the show that i as a producer and the host that i work with  journalist that i work with the what we produce is we have a number of correspondence that are across the world and they're all professional journalists and these are people who live and work as journalists in their respective countries and these are countries that either have also large populations of former soviet union ex pats or they are countries that matter on the world scene also gives us reports every week and it's fascinating because we get to see things from the perspective of somebody who lives in the usa who have also been directly affected by it not us looking at it so a lot of people were talking about what happens when great britain leaves europe which is known as briggs it and being able to see from his perspective what that means to somebody who lives there and how it all factors travel how it will affect people that live very different experience than just hearing about it on your evening news and just being able to get into the details of it which often times media that's overseas doesn't really get to do and that's what we do and we devote you know almost the same amount of time that you and i get to talk to them having a discussion format so even though they prepare certain things and sermons areas and they want to talk about it's also open ended so we do have discussions and follow up questions just to clarify these things and that's the beauty of having journalists there are able to carry will to not just give you you know something that's learned or just off the cuff for two minutes but they're really able to expand on these things because they go in depth into all these issues and i think what you just said and what i think about one of the points on the with the bill that that's working its way through is not just the idea of you having the local news you know what's going on in your community but also having that means of connecting to other communities so even though i may live in trenton i might want to know what's going on in new brunswick and the issues in new brunswick might not be the same is the issues here but there's there's something great about just being able to have that conversation and have that connection so i know what things are looking like from your perspective and now you have the opportunity to understand how things are looking like from my perspective and that's what i'm hearing when you talk about your show yeah i mean let's be honest you never want to know what's going on in pittsburgh yes a lot of these people these are their hometowns yet where they left that these are places where they're of where their relatives live where their their friends live where they're i mean we have russian correspondents maybe cranium correspondents germany israel these are people lived there were directly related to it they want to know the perspective of their relatives but they might not be able to articulate or the same way so we provide them with journalists who give them a sort of a larger picture who can zoom out to ten thousand feet a look at it from a bigger picture and  can also zoom in and give us the little details that matter which we might not be aware of in the larger scheme of things so we are literally almost out of time if always goes too fast yes always go through fed so can you give just that one thing that i would love to leave our audience with which connects to everything we talked about today is don't forget to be involved in the communities in which you live  because you're neighbors and not just you neighbors but opening up yourself to other people you will find that you have a lot more in common with those people absent then you have differences we might have differences of opinion we might have differences of politics and how to approach things and solutions but we deal with the same problems and by identifying that it will be easier to come to share solutions because when you can identify your neighbor as somebody with a name and and with some kind of association to you it's not just going to be numbers on a blackboard exactly so we are completely out of time i want to thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time