Amber Healy, Author at It's All Journalism

451. Axios newsletter tackles local news in Tampa Bay

Selene San Felice might only be a few years into her career, but she has learned and seen quite a bit. One of the things she’s learned is that a newsletter is a great way for reporters to connect with and cover a community.

A native of Maryland, San Felice went to college in Tampa Bay and, as life would have it, she’s now working from her Maryland home for a new Axios newsletter based in Tampa Bay with her mentor, Ben Montgomery.

In the interim, she spent 3 1/2 years at the Capital Gazette, including the terrible day when her editor and four other colleagues were killed back in 2018.

Selene San Felice recently started a new job working on Axios’ Tampa Bay newsletter.

“I started at the Capital as a general assignment reporter. I was a night shift person, which meant I ended at 9 p.m. I covered late meetings, I’d cover a vigil every now and then. But mostly I was doing a lot of features,” she says. “They’d have you do human interest features and I loved doing that. I fell in love with doing features.”

The horrible tragedy at the Capital Gazette and the looming sale to a hedge fund (which has since changed course) also underscored for San Felice the importance and power of local newspapers.

“I think that, especially working at a place like Axios, a national outlet where we’re going into local news, we want to make sure we’re having friendly competition but also lifting up local outlets,” she says. “If the Times has a great feature, I can point people to that. I learned that lesson at the Capital when I walked out of the newsroom that day and thought this is it, we’re going to be shut down, and we kept putting the paper out the day after and every day after that.”

She’s also learning the benefit of newsletters, something she would’ve laughed off a year or two ago.

“I didn’t take newsletters seriously,” San Felice says. “I have learned that it is incredibly hard to do a newsletter. It needs to be something that’s not overwhelming and people need to get their news. I think it’s a really awesome thing when I open my Axios newsletter in the morning, I’m more inclined to open it up because I’m going to get what I need in three minutes. It’s fast and I can move on with my day.”

She and Montgomery have also decided to let their own personalities shine through, including little notes at the bottom of each newsletter telling readers what they’re reading, or watching, or listening to, or cooking.

“You get to know us as journalists and people,” San Felice says. “I think that’s part of what the news is all about. It’s about having that good beat reporter you know you can depend on. The news should also be fun, as hard and difficult and overwhelming as it is, if you like us, you should be able to get to know us as well.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Selene San Felice, a new reporter with Axios in Tampa Bay. She discusses her newfound respect for newsletters, the importance of local news and why her new outlet will help lift up what others might consider the competition.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

450. Gulf States Newsroom launches to share regional stories nationally

Priska Neely is overseeing and managing a new journalism collaborative startup, NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom, to help public media stations in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi share regionally important stories on healthcare, criminal justice and issues of wealth and poverty.

In some ways, her reporting and this new initiative are deeply linked to the work she’s been doing most of her life.

While at KPPC in LA, Neely covered issues pertaining to children between the ages of birth and 5. “I did a lot of stories about curriculum and child care issues in LA and California,” she says. “The story that took over my life was about Black infant mortality. I heard that Black babies are twice as likely to die as white babies in the first year of their life. As a Black woman, I was shocked. That was the first time hearing that.”

It was a personal story and statistic for her: “My sister lost two babies that were born premature. My other sister had my nephew premature. They didn’t know that statistic. They didn’t know their own personal statistics were wrapped up in that trend of racism, of being a Black woman in America and how that plays out in your own health outcomes. That was one of my driving questions: Does the community that this impacts even realize they’re part of it?”

The first story out from Gulf States Newsroom, by Shalina Chatlani, the health care reporter based at WWNO in New Orleans, explores a different element of the same core problem of systemic racism and disparities in health care access.

NPR’s new station investigations team had some data about where vaccination sites were placed in major cities across the South and were exploring disparities around race.

“Her story looked at Baton Rouge, where there aren’t many medical facilities, pharmacies or grocery stores, places where the (COVID-19) vaccine is being distributed,” Neely says. “The data showed that three-quarters of sites people had access to were in the southern part of the city, in mostly white areas. She was able to go there and talk to leaders in the north part of the city about pre-existing issues and how this is life for them. They’re now seeing that inequity in the vaccine rollout.”

The story was broadcast by all three stations involved in the Gulf States Newsroom and the reporter was involved in an NPR roundtable with a reporter from another state.

“She’s going to have a version of the story that we did locally, regionally and on NPR nationally, too,” Neely says. “It’s fulfilling and checking all the boxes: we shared content in three states and issues from this region,” but it will also find a national audience, something Neely hopes to do on a regular basis with the new initiative.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Priska Neely, managing editor of the new Gulf States Newsroom project from NPR. She talks about her career in journalism and the new initiative to help tell important stories from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi across the region and the nation.

423. Covering Black communities with nuance and purpose

449. Making amends for failing to tell The Truth in Black and White

The Brush Creek flood in September 1977 destroyed a portion of Kansas City, killing 25 people and wrecking countless businesses, homes and causing other damage.

The Kansas City Star, at the time, focused on the destruction at the Country Club Plaza, a high-end shopping center, and the affluent neighborhoods near there.

Mará Rose Williams, a 22-year education reporter with the Kansas City Star and co-creator of the paper’s series, “The Truth in Black and White.”

There was little written at the time about the devastation to the Black neighborhoods nearby, where most of the flooding took place.

“Our reporters did not go into those communities and talk to those people about how the flood impacted their lives,” says Mará Rose Williams, who now serves as the paper’s education reporter. “People tend to gravitate toward where they are comfortable and what they know. When you have a newsroom or an industry where a diverse population is not represented, you are going to miss a complete perspective. That’s exactly what happened with the Kansas City Star.”

Williams is trying to fix that overlooked, misreported and misrepresented story, among others, by leading an initiative to go back through the Star’s coverage, historically, and find examples of other incidents in which the lives of Black Americans were overlooked, ignored or poorly judged.

Williams is the driving force behind the Star’s series “The Truth in Black and White.” It kicked off last year with an apology for the paper’s historic failure to cover racism and discrimination in the city and to go back and re-report events to try and correct old mistakes.

“We know we live in a society that, for decades and decades, has marginalized people of color. As a result, newspapers did the same. That’s just a fact. We know that,” she says. “I was interested in trying to find out exactly, pinpointing, where and what we did at the Star. I knew papers across the country had done this but I wanted to find out what we had done.”

She had the support of her editors upon explaining her idea of the series, which began with an apology. The apology was important, she says, because if a newspaper is truly sincere in trying to make up for the mistakes of the past, it has to acknowledge that mistakes were made and take ownership of them.

In re-investigating the flood, the Star tried to reach out to some people whose lives were upended. The Star also relied on the reporting of the Kansas City Call, the city’s Black-owned weekly paper, which covered the floods extensively at the time.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Mará Rose Williams, a 22-year education reporter with the Kansas City Star and co-creator of the paper’s series, “The Truth in Black and White.” The series began with an apology for the paper’s white-washing of history and failing to adequately cover the lives and losses of Black Americans and revisited some events to try and make things right.

#324 — Lynching, racism and seizing a moment to atone for a paper’s past sins

448. Giving sources the power to tell their own stories

Too often, and for too long, reporters have practiced “parachute” journalism, dropping into communities and working with a local to cover a story before flying off again.

“That usually leaves a lot to be desired in terms of missing context,” says Britney Dennison, deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. “A reporter might hire a local fixer, but the fixer might not have the same type of ownership over that reporting process.” The reporter also simply tells the story they believe needs to be told, missing a lot of nuance and depth is just below the surface.

Britney Dennison is the deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre.

The Global Reporting Centre is modeling a new type of in-person reporting, centered on storytellers who are far more involved and entrenched in the process and outcome than a parachute piece.

“We’ve really started to think about, how do we reframe that model?” Dennison says, thinking about who the audience is for a piece and how can the community and that audience have a greater stake in the outcome to provide a more resonant story.

“We started developing this model we called empowerment journalism,” she says. “The idea was to work with a story subject and make it almost autobiographical. The story subject was really serving as the director and involved in every stage of the production. We would sit down ahead of the interview and ask questions: What would you ask yourself? Do you want anyone else featured? Are there any new places we can film? We’d give our own feedback, like this seems like something meaningful to your story, how would you feel about filming there, or it seems like your story is for searching about identity, does that seem correct to you.

“The whole power dynamic has shifted,” she says. “We’re there for support for the storyteller and to capture their autobiographical story.”

The end result of this, following years of reporting, editing and, in some cases, starting from scratch, is the Turning Points series produced in partnership with PBS Newshour.

“It’s eight videos, eight storytellers, each one talking about challenges and resilience in Indigenous communities around alcohol use addictions,” Dennison says. Their work started in 2016 with consideration of how to tell more nuanced stories about alcoholism and addictions in First Nations communities in northern Canada, “a community and a story that has been historically misrepresented for a long time. Not only are stories about addiction and alcohol use heavily reliant on stereotypes, when they talk about native communities, they’re often outright racist and miss context and the historical traumas that exist in these communities,” Dennison says.

The group spent so much time, and so much care and effort, working diligently with Indigenous storytellers that people were surprised the group was still around, years after the project started, Dennison says.

“For so long, journalists that have worked in Indigenous communities have come in and taken stories from them,” she says. “Since we were there year after year, we were able to build trust.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Britney Dennison, deputy director of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver. She talks about empowerment journalism and the culmination of several years’ worth of work, a new series for PBS Newshour called Turning Points.

434. Put community at the center of your journalism

447. Freelancer won’t let cerebral palsy sideline his sports writing career

Blake Baumgartner has more to give and more stories to tell.

A passionate sports fan since childhood, he went to Michigan State University to pursue a career in journalism, ideally sportswriting.

Blake Baumgartner is a freelance sports writer from Naperville, Illinois.

For the better part of a decade, Baumgartner worked as a freelancer for the The Sun in Naperville, Illinois, a three-days-per-week newspaper, covering the important football, boys basketball and baseball stories of local high schools and serving as the lead prep writer.

“I was doing what a staff writer would be doing, covering those three beats. Features, gamers, all-area packages, any recruiting stuff, like if we had an athlete commit to a school,” he says. “I was doing what a staff writer would do, just without the title and cache that goes with it.”

There is one other main difference between Baumgartner and other full-time sports writers, in Naperville and other markets. Baumgartner has cerebral palsy, which limits his mobility.

“The only difficulty was football,” he says. While other reporters could stand on the sidelines, notebook in one hand and pen in the other to take notes, he needed to cover the game from the press box. “I can’t stand for long periods of time and being able to grip something in my left hand and write with my right. I’d have to be up in the press box, keeping my own stats, keeping play-by-play in a steno notebook. I can’t drive. My mother’s kind of a saint. She’d drop me off at any game and then pick me up.”

Filing stories wasn’t an issue as he’d attend games on Fridays and weekends, go home to file a story with his editor for a weekend website publication and the story would be in print later.

Unfortunately, Baumgartner knows his mobility limitations have restricted his abilities this far. He’s eager and hopeful, however, that this won’t be the end of his story.

On the advice of some contacts who have become allies at ESPN, he wrote a few pieces for Medium telling of his passion and challenges. The personal pieces were among the most difficult he’s had to write, Baumgartner says, but he wants to keep sharing his story, and his life, in the hopes of landing a full-time job covering sports.

“I’m scared to death that I’ve been typecast” as a high school sports writer, he admits. “My intention was never that. My intention was always to pay my dues.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Blake Baumgartner, a freelance sports writer from Naperville, Illinois. They discuss Blake’s passion for sports and the difficulties he’s faced as a reporter with cerebral palsy.

417. Can’t find women who know sports? Try harder

446. It’s a dangerous time to be a journalist in America

It will likely come as no surprise to know that 2020 was a dangerous year to be a journalist in the United States.

Michael De Dora, the Washington advocacy manager at the Committee to Protect Journalists, says the organization’s most recent census found a 600 percent increase in attacks on journalists compared with 2019 in the U.S. alone. This includes more than 100 journalists arrested and/or criminally charged and some 300 assaulted.

Michael De Dora is the Washington Advocacy Manager at Committee to Protect Journalists.

“We’re sifting through 980 total violations related to social unrest protests” alone, he says.

The protests around the country last summer, in particular, put American journalists in a dangerous position, as they were physically between those demonstrating in the streets and the law enforcement officers who both didn’t want the reporters there and might not have known who the members of the press were unless they were wearing vests or other identification. (Granted, some officers knew who members of the press were and attacked them anyway.)

“What you’re seeing is something that is the result of the soil and the atmosphere that already existed,” De Dora says. Politicians from the highest levels of government down to local elected officials “have been accusing journalists of being fake news and enemies of the people. Coupled with the rapid disappearance of local news outlets in a large percent of the United States, we have a situation in which people may be more open to accusations that news organizations are fake news or enemies of the people, because they may not know a journalist or have a local outlet. Accusations of being fake news may more easily take hold. Unfortunately, this leads us to, for the United States, a country where there’s fear and mistrusts of journalists and news organizations and the information they’re producing. This is in large part due to the fact that we have elected leaders who find it too easy to blindly criticize journalists.”

While the number of attacks against journalists has risen, and distrust of the news has grown, De Dora notes that this in and of itself isn’t exactly new.

“What’s interesting is about (Thomas) Jefferson and (John) Adams and others who wrote the founding documents (of the United States), even while they were speaking to this need to have an independent press … they were not really that friendly toward the press in their private written documents. In a lot of letters they exchanged, they were critical of the news out there,” he says. “What we’re seeing that’s different from the last decades is what you said, this complete attack on the role that the independent press plays in a democratic society.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Michael De Dora, Washington advocacy manager with the Committee to Protect Journalists. They discuss the sharp increase in attacks against American journalists in 2020 and what might be in store for the press under a new administration.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

In Lebanon, women from African countries who work as maids are often abused, raped, and essentially treated like slaves by their employers. Under a sponsorship system called kafala, in which maids are legally tied to the people who hire them, this abuse goes unpunished and under-reported.

But Lisa Khoury, an investigative freelance reporter who lives in Buffalo but has close family ties in Lebanon, thought about this abusive system and the women whose lives are ruined by it, for seven years before she had the opportunity to bring it to light.

A recent article published by Washington Monthly shares their stories and the efforts to make a change.

“This one has been on my mind for seven years, since my first adult trip,” Khoury says. “I noticed that there are these Black and Asian maids who are treated incredibly poorly. I thought it was too hard a story to do because there were so many barriers in the way.”

During her last trip to Lebanon, in 2019, she explained her seemingly far-fetched story idea to a family friend, who then introduced her to their maid, Josephine, originally from Ghana.

“She opened up to me for two hours. She was crying, telling me about her past employers who starved her, made her sleep on the kitchen floor, attempted to rape her, verbally abused her, didn’t let her speak to their children because they said she would infect them with African diseases. At the end of the conversation, Josephine took a deep breath, like a sigh of relief,” Khoury says. “The next day she told me that for the first time in years, she slept, because she felt like she got it off her chest.”

From there, Khoury contacted Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which have been publishing reports and calling on the Lebanese government for decades to end kafala. She was also introduced to a Facebook group called This Is Lebanon, founded by former migrant domestic workers who had been abused themselves.

“Because the Lebanese government is so negligent, not just on maids but on its own people, there’s no reliable justice system or police enforcement or rules or laws that protect maids,” she says. “They go to this Facebook group. It gets thousands of messages a year from women saying can you help me, I haven’t been paid in months, can you please help me, I’ve been sexually assaulted, can you help me convince my boss to let me go home. There are people behind the Facebook group that then contact these employers and say if you don’t let this person go, we will do X, Y, Z. It’s kind of bizarre, but when you live in a country where there are no rules and no proper system in place, this is what they have to do.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by freelance journalist Lisa Khoury to discuss her new investigative piece, The Real Housemaids of Beirut. She reports on the disturbing abuse of domestic workers and maids in Lebanon who have very little protection or recourse against their employers.

#322 — Syrian child brides: Pursuing a story that needed telling

444. How Documented uses WhatsApp to reach its audience

Reporting on immigrants and refugees is a daunting task. Getting that coverage back to those protagonists can be equally difficult, especially if the reporter and publication use a different language.

Mazin Sidahmed started his career as a software engineer, but his passion for journalism led him to cover immigrants and refugees, first reporting about the plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon before moving to the United States and reporting on broader immigration issues.

In early 2017, following the inauguration and early dramatic policy changes around immigration from the Trump administration, Sidahmed and a friend started thinking about taking on a project focused on immigration reform. They received a grant to start a newsroom and saw a great opportunity to work more directly with the immigrant and refugee community.

Their project, Documented, covers “New York City immigrants and the policies that affect their lives,” Sidahmed says. “One of the things we knew starting this was people who work on immigration issues professionally will gravitate toward our work.”

The challenge, then, was finding ways to get their work out in front of the people who would be not only their audience, but their sources and the voices in their reporting.

“When I was in Lebanon, I’d go to a refugee camp, go back and write a story, and there would be no connection to the protagonist of my story. The story was published in a language they don’t speak. … We wanted to break that cycle and make sure the people affected by our stories were the people reading our stories. We started off thinking it would be easy, we’d just translate our stories into other languages and people would find it. That wasn’t the case.”

They partnered with a professor who taught a class on reporting with communities and learned, through a year-long project, that while people were interested in the expected kind of information — how to find lawyers, how to extend visas — but learned there was no centralized place to get information and the resources they were looking to access.

They also learned that the immigrant and refugee community utilized WhatsApp, a secure social networking platform, to share what information they had.

Documented is now a WhatsApp newsletter. People are finding their articles and reporting via searches, in which a few sentences are published but readers are encouraged to send Documented a message and join their group.

“It has revolutionized our approach to journalism,” Sidahmed says. “We re-engineered our newsroom to be focused from the ground-up, making sure people affected by our stories were our readers. We didn’t realize what it took to achieve that until we did community engagement work. Now we are reaching a place where that’s true and we’re building a secure relationship. People are feeding us information that’s the source of stories, and they’re in the stories. It’s become more organic.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell speaks with Mazin‌ ‌Sidahmed‌, founder of the immigration publication Documented. They discuss how WhatsApp has become Documented’s distribution network and why listening to the immigration and refugee community changed the course of his work.

433. Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

443. Tucson newspaper proves to be a vital source for the Latinx community

The Latinx community around Tucson, Arizona, has been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. La Estrella De Tucson, a weekly Spanish-language newspaper, with the support of the Arizona Daily Star, has taken this moment to refocus on what its readers want and need to know in order to better protect their health and their futures.

Liliana Lopez has worked for the paper for 16 years and became its editor last year. While she’s the only writer on staff for La Estrella, she says the support of the Arizona Daily Star newsroom has helped her share information, in English and Spanish, with her community.

“Other publications here are more oriented to commercial or marketing. I don’t want to say they’re not doing a good job but they have a different role,” she says. “La Estrella is doing real journalism. … I think our community recognizes our effort. The organizations who are trying to help the Latinx community have been working very closely with us.”

In addition to her new title at La Estrella, Lopez also was afforded the opportunity to participate in a Community Listening Fellowship sponsored by the American Press Institute.

“Something had been broken at some point and we were very focused on how to better know and listen to our audience,” she says. “Then we learned about this fellowship. We applied and I‘m so grateful that the American Press Institute gave me the opportunity to be part of this program. It couldn’t be more important for me and for us at La Estrella.”

After the fellowship, Lopez and the paper initiated a reader and community survey to better understand the readers, their concerns, their issues, and what they held to be important.

“We learned that we have the same dreams, the same issues,” she says. “We all want to be healthy, we want to be in a better position, but we are not all at the same level. We wanted to work, to do journalism that would be useful for our community. This fellowship came at the very right moment for us.”

Top among the list of priorities: affordable health services and ways to help children go to college.

La Estrella has worked to provide information to its readers not only about federal programs for health care, but also community-based health opportunities for those who might not be eligible for government assistance.

“We created a couple of stories telling people why and how this pandemic is affecting more of our Latinx students, especially with illegal status. What we learned in those past months is now in use to create relevant journalism in this pandemic. Health services and education opportunities are one of our focuses. We have been able to address these subjects in the pandemic context.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Liliana Lopez, editor of La Estrella de Tucson, a weekly Spanish-language paper in Arizona. They discuss what she learned from the American Press Institute’s Community Listening Fellowship and how she put that information to use to help the Latinx community during the pandemic.

437. Objectivity, racism, and the crisis of credibility

442. 2020 Lookback: America from Canada’s perspective

The long peaceful border between the U.S. and Canada provides for more than just easy passage (in non-COVID times) between countries. It allows for shared experiences and stories that cross freely through radio and TV broadcasts.

The two countries are separate entities, however, and in the 1960s, many fled the draft during the Vietnam War to find shelter from the conflict in Canada.

In the lead-up to the November election, Dave Bidini and his West End Phoenix newspaper in Toronto wanted to use the time to talk with some American ex-pats living in Toronto about what it was like to observe that chaos from afar and how their life in Canada was different from what they left behind.

It was an ambitious project — while the broadsheet paper usually publishes once a month or about every five weeks, this was the paper’s second issue in October — and contains 25 personal narratives about what it’s like to be an American living in Canada.

“One of the things I wanted to check at the door was the self-aggrandizement that happens when Canadians write about the States,” says Bidini, one of the paper’s creators and a founder of the band the Rheostatics. “We’re pretty good at positioning ourselves as superior. We overlook our own issues when talking about ourselves in the context of the States. … Often when you find, when there’s the perspective from Canada about other places, it’s always gun laws and health care, but there’s a lot of ways we fall short.”

In the issue, simply called The Americans, Bidini says he was heartened to see stories of longing.

“Lot of people said it’s great being in Toronto but I miss my home and I miss my family and I miss this about living in the U.S.,” he says. “One woman talks about having a beautiful home in Detroit with a big yard and what it cost her for living in that city. I was pleasantly surprised people were able to talk about their yearning for a place they left.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is rejoined by Dave Bidini, co-founder of The Rheostatics and the West End Phoenix, a Toronto-based broadsheet newspaper. They discuss The Americans, a special edition published just before the November election in which ex-pats living in Toronto write about what it’s like to observe the U.S. from across the shared border during a difficult time.

#357 Keeping print alive in Toronto’s West End

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