Journalism

College newspaper reporters are the journalism heroes for the pandemic era - In New York, it was NYU's Washington Square News that first reported a COVID-19 outbreak in a college dorm. In Gainesville, Fla., the UF Alligator is the newspaper that has been painstakingly updating a map of local cases. And the Daily Gamecock alerted the public to the ways that the University of South Carolina officials were withholding information about COVID-19 clusters. While the pandemic economy has devastated the local news business, there remains a cadre of small newspapers that are more energized than ever, producing essential work from the center of the nation’s newest coronavirus hot spots. Those would be college newspapers, whose student journalists have been kept busy breaking news of campus outbreaks, pushing for transparency from administrators, and publishing scathing editorials about controversial reopening plans. Read More

GovTech & CivicTech 

Big tech needs new, powerful government watchdogs to enforce real transparency - Here’s an unsettling exercise: Imagine if the food manufacturing industry could abandon all transparency. In this world, the Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t exist to monitor and label food. Essential regulation such as the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Food Safety Modernization Act would be absent. And the work of crusaders such as Alice Lakey and Upton Sinclair would have fallen on disinterested ears. Without mandated transparency and the interventions it enables, consumers would shoulder grave consequences: filthy factories, routine food poisoning, never-ending listeria outbreaks, and worse. Read More

Election Security: A Statescoop & Edscoop Special Report - With just weeks before November 3rd, the attention of the public increasingly turns to the presidential race. Between controversy surrounding vote-by-mail, disinformation campaigns and a growing host of threats facing election administrators who have been hardening their systems and building out their contact lists over the past four years, a wide range of concerns face government officials tasked with maintaining confidence in the democratic process and ensuring a smooth process on Election Day. The editorial teams at StateScoop and EdScoop hope these articles will help make sense of the great amount of work that goes into organizing and securing American elections while sketching a rough outline of adversaries who seek to erode confidence in our democratic system. Read More

Democracy 

The New Monuments That America Needs - Before protesters in America and Europe began painting over statues, or toppling them, or hanging them from trees, or rolling them into the nearest river, the historian Paul Farber noticed that people were putting masks on them. In the early days of the pandemic, from Wuhan to New York, Valencia, and Limerick, anonymous people placed covid-19 coverings over the faces of local monuments. There was something tender, even a little funny, about these gestures, the kind of thing done for Instagram: a photo of a masked Patience and Fortitude, the two lions that sit outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, went viral. Whether monuments take the form of a statue, building, or pillar, they present themselves as universal and timeless, expressing something essential about all of us—at least in a way that flatters the powers that be. Putting a mask on these inanimate objects shifted them to a new context: the present, rather than the historical past. Read more

Only About 3.5 Percent of Americans Care About Democracy - Imagine a candidate you like. This politician has everything: the right positions on taxes, abortion, foreign policy, immigration; sound judgment; enough personal probity to be trusted with your wallet, house keys, or email password. Now imagine that that candidate does or says something anti-democratic. For no particular reason, she shuts down polling stations. Or at a rally, she tells supporters that a particular journalist—standing over there, in the Men’s Wearhouse sport coat—is asking too many questions and might deserve to get rabbit-punched on the way to his car. Care to change your vote? Read more

To achieve racial justice, America’s broken democracy must be fixed - Maurice Mitchell first became an organizer almost 20 years ago. After a Howard University classmate of his was killed by police officers, Mitchell began campaigning against police brutality and for divestment from private prisons. He would go on to help build the Movement for Black Lives, and today he serves as the national director of the Working Families Party, which works to elect progressive candidates to offices across the country. But Mitchell’s sense of the problem has changed over the years. He used to think if he could just mobilize enough support and change enough minds, that would be enough to make progress on the issues that mattered most to his community. Now he knows that was wrong. If you want to change the outcomes the political system produces, you need to change the political system itself. Read more

Police Transparency

Police are using the law to deny the release of records involving use of force, critics claim - Two months after the family of Daniel Prude tried to obtain police body-camera footage showing Prude naked, handcuffed, and hooded on a Rochester, N.Y., street, nationwide protests against police violence were gaining momentum — and officials did not want the video to be made public.“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t hold back on this for a little while considering what is going on around the country,” a police lieutenant wrote in a June email. Officials suggested citing an “open” investigation. Days later, they raised concerns about the medical privacy of Prude, who died a week after the video was filmed in March. “Can we deny/delay?” a top city attorney wrote in a flurry of emails between city officials. Read more

‘We Have Not Defunded Anything’: Big Cities Boost Police Budgets - It seemed like a turning point. In May, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, sparking protests against racism across the country and an unrelenting demand from protesters in city after city: Defund the police. But after months of demonstrations, that rallying cry hasn’t translated into reality. While a few major cities like New York and Los Angeles have made large, high profile cuts, more than half actually increased spending or kept it unchanged as a percentage of their discretionary spending, based on a Bloomberg CityLab analysis of 34 of the largest 50 U.S. cities that have finalized 2021 budgets. As a group, the difference between police spending as a share of the general funds fell less than 1% from last year. The city council in Indianapolis is poised to vote on an increase to its police budget in the coming weeks. Read more

Breonna Taylor and Robert Kraft: A tale of America's two justice systems - In the same week that we learned that the police officer whose bullet killed Breonna Taylor would not be charged with a crime, we also heard that charges would be dismissed against Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. For many Americans, we cannot help but see this as a tale of two justice systems. Read more

COVID-19 

Helping Students Make New Friends During COVID Is Possible. Two Programs Show How. - “I might be one of the few people coming out of the COVID-19 situation with more friends,” said Karine Durand. Durand’s words have stuck with me for months. This past June, she and I were both speakers on a JFF Horizons conference panel focused on the power of investing in students’ social capital to break down barriers to opportunity. Durand explained to the audience that in her day job as a nanny, she hadn’t spent much time building a professional network. But since enrolling in Climb Hire, a program preparing working adults for jobs that require a background in using Salesforce, her network had started to look remarkably different. And bigger. Read more

In Internet Dead Zones, Rural Schools Struggle With Distanced Learning - The past seven months have been a big strain on families like Mandi Boren's. The Borens are cattle ranchers on a remote slice of land near Idaho's Owyhee Mountains. They have four kids — ranging from a first grader to a sophomore in high school. When the lockdown first hit, Boren first thought it might be a good thing. Homeschooling temporarily could be more efficient, plus there'd be more family time and help with the chores."I thought, I'll be able to get my kids' schooling done in a few hours and then they'll be to work with dad, and no problem it will be great," Boren says, chuckling. "Well, it didn't turn out so great."That's because all four kids — in addition to Boren, who telecommutes — were suddenly plunged into the family's satellite Internet, which is spotty on a good day. You can forget trying to use Zoom or Google Classroom. Read more

NOTEWORTHY FREE EVENTS

Thursday, October 1st at 5:00 PM (ET), 2:00 PM (PT), A webinar focusing on how a little more than half of the eligible voters participated in recent elections which means … close to half did not. Who doesn’t vote and why? Join 92Y for a discussion that will explore the latest findings on non-voters with insights from Knight Foundation’s landmark 100 Million Project. Why are so many Americans disengaged from the political process? What would change if they turned out to vote? Register Here 

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