Hey Friend, 

👋🏻 Sarah Glen here, I’m Scalawag’s new audience manager. It’s my job to make sure what’s playing out where you live is reflected in our coverage and that our stories are read by as many people as possible. To put it differently: I’m here to build community and collective power across the South—and who better to do that with than members like you?

I come to Scalawag after nearly 10 years of working in local news, first working with students, parents, and educators across the country at Chalkbeat, and most recently keeping Texans informed on issues like COVID-19 and a deadly winter freeze at The Texas Tribune.

Now, I’m excited to work with y’all to tell the story of the South that we know exists—the one where a brighter, more just future is not only possible, but already in progress.

It’s an exciting time for Scalawag. We’re publishing journalism that highlights the work of movements, recognizes community power, and makes abstract ideals practical. And we’re amplifying incarcerated folks and calling out corporate practices that harm workers to pad profit margins, too.

But there’s more work to do. If you can, take a couple minutes and let me know where you live, what’s going on in your community, and how you’d like to learn and grow with Scalawag in this short survey. Your responses will help inform our future plans, including some ideas we’re working on around events, community and growth.
 

Shifting narratives across the South to center the oppressed isn’t work we can do alone. Thanks for doing it with us. If you have capacity to deepen your support, here are some other ways to pitch in:

1. Pitch us a story. The South has so many stories to tell. We can’t cover them all, but we’ll do our damndest. We pay every contributor upon publication, and we prioritize pitches from BIPOC and queer Southerners. 
    
2. Follow us on social and share our work with the people in your life who should know about our reporting and events. We’re especially interested in having more conversations with y’all on Instagram:

You’ll be hearing from me about once a month with updates on what our newsroom is up to and what member events we’re planning, but for now, I’ll leave you with one last thing: When I interviewed to join Scalawag’s team of part-timers, I had just finished reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell for my other job as a bookseller at an indie bookstore in Austin, Texas. This excerpt is one of the best examples of what I mean when I say I do movement journalism:

"If we think about what it means to 'concentrate' or 'pay attention' at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a movement to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other."

If you’re down to pay close attention to what’s happening in the South and to look out for each other while we do it, Scalawag will always be here to work with you. I’d love to hear from you anytime in our DMs or at sarah@scalawagmagazine.org.

In solidarity,
 

Sarah Glen
Audience Manager, Scalawag
@saraheglen