CEM is dedicated to introducing and giving airtime to voices that would otherwise go unheard, particularly the voices and stories of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In addition to the usual scholars and intellectuals, listeners will hear the individuals directly affected by the issues presented. From students to prostitutes to Vietnam veterans, individuals who have not often been given the opportunity to speak will be granted a platform.

CEM’s strategy is to use public radio as its base and primary medium but to integrate that work with video, and in particular the visual interactive power of the Internet.  The Internet – through its enhanced capacity, archival depth, and links from major media and organizational sites – will allow CEM’s programs to reach a much wider audience.

Contributors to CEM’s past and current projects include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Open Society Institute, Abell Foundation, Fund for Change, Stony Run Friends Meeting, and a number of individual donors.

Marc Steiner
From 1993 to 2008, Marc Steiner hosted the widely acclaimed public radio news and interview program, "The Marc Steiner Show". In 1993, the show was launched on WJHU. In 2001 when WJHU came up for sale, Steiner led the movement to maintain community ownership of the station, playing an integral role in the founding of WYPR. He served as Executive Vice President of WYPR from February 2002 through August of 2005.

Earlier in his career, Steiner founded a theater program in the Maryland state prison system, as well as the Family Circle Theater, a company of teenagers that produced original productions about adolescent issues. He also served for ten years on the faculty of the Baltimore School for the Arts. Steiner was a therapeutic counselor and director of counseling programs focusing on inner city neighborhoods and prisons. He and Valerie live in the country just outside of Baltimore. He has three children and five grandchildren.

Andrew Eppig
Andrew Eppig, A graduate of Full Sail, is Senior Production Engineer at Clean Cuts Music and Sound Design in Baltimore, MD. With a background in music and production, his work spans across all forms of media content.

Steve Elliot
Steve Elliot has been a producer / assistant director of television commercials since the early 1980s, working primarily for EUE/ScreenGems. Prior to that Steve was an assistant film editor and folk musician and lived and worked around New York City. Since 1994, Steve has also worked as an adjunct professor at NYU, teaching film editing and then digital editing.

He has known Marc Steiner since they went to boarding school together. In the spring of 1965, Marc, Steve and two other classmates, Steve Gilmer and Michael Duarte, formed American Youth for Vietnam Youth [AYVY] to collect clothing and any other helpful material for victims of the war that had just started.

In 2005 Steiner asked Elliot to join his trip to Vietnam and videotape the making of the radio documentary Shared Weight. Later in the year he was asked to assume the producer role in finishing the series, which, as a longtime public radio junkie and someone open to trying just about anything, he accepted. Shared Weight is his first radio production.

Jessica Phillips
Jessica Phillips joined the Center for Emerging Media as a producer in February of 2008. From 2005 to 2008, she was a producer of the Marc Steiner Show at WYPR in Baltimore, Maryland. She has also been a production assistant at the Soundprint Media Center and an office manager at Livingston Associates, a public radio consultation and search firm.

In 2007, Jessica Phillips produced a documentary features series called Just Words. This weekly four minute feature explored the lives of the working poor and other marginalized groups. The program aired each Thursday during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WYPR. Just Words was a production of the Center for Emerging Media.

She is a graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio and is from Ocean City, Maryland.

Justin Levy
Justin Levy is a producer at the Center for Emerging Media. He also comes to CEM from WYPR, where he worked as a producer for The Marc Steiner Show from November 2006 to February 2008. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in Film and Media Studies. He was born in New York and has lived there, Florida and New Jersey. He has lived in Baltimore nearly 10 years.