hand-drawn "Weekly News," with children's writing, five issues laid out

A short note: Newsrooms that serve

It’s been one year and my niece and her friends’ news startup is going strong! They reached two-thirds circulation of their class and are now reviewing their costs (copying machines and staples) and distribution (reading period is a good time for news) while still serving their classmates. I’ve spent a lot of the last year […]

woman on rocky beach looking out at new york city skyline

In collaborations, who gets paid?

This is a short note to tackle something head on that I’ve been having sideways conversations about for a few months. It’s a very “inside-journalism” subject, so please forgive me if you aren’t in the media. Hopefully, this is still interesting and applicable to your industry. Many of my colleagues have asked to know more […]

In Texas, the conflicts between immigration enforcement and public safety concerns is on display

What’s happening in Texas is part of a larger national debate about how local and state law enforcement policies can affect public safety. SB4 is the first state law seeking to penalize sanctuary cities, but many other similar pieces of legislation are moving through states around the country. On the other hand, the governor of Illinois signed […]

April 6 in Chicago: People-Centered Immigration Storytelling

I led a workshop at the Journalism and Women Symposium in Virginia in October that I think was supposed to be about technology. But the only tools anyone really needed was some scratch paper and a pen. What I’ve found in developing a social strategy for Public Radio International and for our immigration coverage, Global […]

The US has already tried registering Muslims. It didn’t work.

I reported on a Muslim registry in the US almost 15 years ago, after 9/11. It never occurred to me, once the Bush administration quietly stopped pursuing the program, that I would have an occasion to report on it again. But here we are. Since this story ran, the Obama administration has taken the National Security […]

‘Detained because my name was Gonzalez’

… Gonzalez and the two other protesters were in the booking area together, where they were processed, fingerprinted and patted down. That’s when, she says, two agents called her by name to come up to the counter. Gonzalez says she was the only one in the booking area who was called up. They began asking questions including, […]