JINN is Pacific News Service's biweekly online magazine, written by the most eccentric network of writers, scholars, reporters and teenagers contributing to the global media.
We call our perspective "the chicken's eye view" because we look at the world from two feet off the ground -- through the lens of culture rather than of politics. For twenty-six years we have been pooling observations, impressions, anecdotes, and insights about the vast diversity of experiences energizing private life. Culling voices that reflect these new energies and articulating ideas that point out where they are moving, how they are transforming the public realm, are JINN's primary concerns.
In our youth coverage in particular, we are developing a literary journalism through which young people -- the most excluded segment in the Information Era -- write about their intimate lives as they intersect with public issues and events. Their stories reveal a microcosm of the world we are becoming.
We chose the name JINN for our online magazine because it is the Arabic word from which the English word genie derives. For us JINN refers to those human energies moving cultures in new directions, transgressing borders and creating the epic dramas that are reshaping our lives.
JINN articles are organized into nine broad categories:
PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE, founded in 1970, is an international association of writers, scholars, journalists and young people who bring new voices and perspectives to newspapers and publications through our daily newspaper syndicate; through magazine articles, essays for TV (in particular the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS) and radio ("All Things Considered" and KQED); through PNS forums and speeches; and through our youth publication called YO! (Youth Outlook).
Originally our focal point was Indochina. As writers familiar with the languages, histories and cultures of East Asia, we sought to illuminate the ground level realities that ultimately proved too powerful for the U.S. war effort. Since 1975, we have immersed ourselves in the changes transforming America -- from immigration, de-industrialization, and the globalization of the economy to the turn to religion by the dispossessed, the growing gap between poor and rich, and the opening up of cyberspace.
Headquartered in San Francisco, which today is more a suburb of Manila, Shanghai and Tijuana than of London or New York, we have long viewed the world from the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. Although many of us live elsewhere, California is our common reference point -- the place where we believe the most important contradictions in our society are working themselves out. California is at once the birthplace of the American Dream and the meeting ground for East Asia and the Latin worlds. It is the country's most diverse state, where a new mestizo population is emerging that is radically altering the dynamics of race relations (the Oakland daughter of a Mexican mother and black father calls herself "blaxican"). California is also at the forefront of youth subcultures -- the state where one out of eight of the nation's youth resides. Yet today the state is investing more money into locking young people up than putting them through college.
PNS writers reflect California's diversity -- not only in terms of race, gender and ethnicity but background, religious orientation, age (almost half our writers are under 21). Together we immerse ourselves not in the institutions that dominate public life but in the affairs of society. The ancient Greeks used the term "idiot" to describe those without a public life. Today we believe the "idiots" have more to tell us about the future than the public scribes.
PNS editors and JINN contributors include: Noted author/essayist Richard Rodriguez, historian/sociologist/linguist and world traveler Franz Schurmann, Vietnamese fiction writer Andrew Lam, feature writer Kathie Dobie, Africa commentator A.R. M. Babu, L.A. performance artist and author Ruben Martinez, social critic Joan Walsh, youth culture writer Nell Bernstein, urban anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, religion and immigration affairs writer Andres Tapia, Asian American historian and activist Ling-Chi Wang, urban affairs writer Sandy Close, futurist Walter Truett Anderson, Japan Times Weekly editor Yoichi Shimatsu, immigration/labor reporter David Bacon, Latin America analyst Andrew Reding, Latino affairs writers Gregory Rodriguez and David Hayes-Bautista, theologian Jim Burtchaell, rural affairs reporters Allison Engel and Jon Christensen, Mideast/Muslim scholar Mamoun Fandy, investigative reporter Dennis Bernstein, poet Mark O'Brien, veteran Central America reporter Mary Jo McConahay, Afro-American scholar Cobie Harris, China specialist Chen Jie, film maker Jessica Yu, photographer Joe Rodriguez, YO! artists Jerod Wheaton, Tucky McKey and Armand Tam, YO! soundscape artist Malcolm Marshall, YO! radio editor Joseph Thomas, YO! youth reporters Andrea Jones, Lyn Duff, Ladie Terry, Chi-Hong Hsu, Loi Bui, Krea Gomez, Ri'Chard Magee, Edward Wallace, Charles Jones, Reyaz Sacharoff.
For more information about how to write to individual PNS contributors, or how to write for PNS, please contact us by e-mail at:
or write or call us at:
Newspapers and other publications can obtain PNS's daily wire over AP Data Features, through twice-weekly mailings or via e-mail at a monthly subscription rate or per piece rate based on circulation. Please contact PNS business manager George Gundrey for price rates and sample copy.
PNS welcomes unsolicited submissions. If you are interested in writing for us, please read the PNS Writer's Guide.
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Do not reprint our articles without our permission.