Journalism with heart and impact

For me, journalism is about the relationship between power and storytelling. Whose stories will be heard? Whose will be believed? Who gets to tell the stories? How can journalism be a tool to shine light on the unheard stories of the least powerful, and to hold the most powerful accountable?

I graduated from Carleton College in 2008, just in time for the economy to crash. I spent five years in communications work for racial and economic justice organizations in the Twin Cities, telling stories about homeowners’ experiences with wrongful foreclosure at the peak of the economic crisis and communities of color fighting against Minnesota’s systemic racial disparities. I wrote and self-published an allegorical rhyming picture book called Fannie and Freddie to make the story of the foreclosure crisis accessible.

In 2014, I took a photo of a co-worker (a black man) posing with the mayor of Minneapolis (a white woman) during a get-out-the-vote drive. They were pointing at each other, as people sometimes do in photos. A local TV station, acting on a tip from the police union, declared this photo to be evidence that the mayor of Minneapolis was flashing “gang signs” with a “convicted felon.” The Twitter backlash to this clearly racist news report, dubbed “Pointergate,” lasted for weeks and made national headlines, even gaining a spot on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This experience made me understand deeply how much it matters which stories are told in the media, and who gets to tell them.

After five years of communications work, I headed to Chicago to study social justice and investigative reporting at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I wanted to report and investigate stories with the independence of a journalist and without an organization’s agenda. My journalism is deeply informed by the years I spent working closely with marginalized communities. I learned how to listen for systemic problems hidden in personal stories and how to investigate to find out more. It was these instincts that led me to investigate Illinois’ Medicaid backlog. I broke the story that more than 100,000 Medicaid applications remained unprocessed past the federal time limit in the Chicago Sun-Times. Since my story was published, government officials in Illinois have announced plans to hire 300 staffers to eliminate the backlog by June 2020.

I graduated from Medill in June 2019 with a master’s of science in journalism. I’m now home in Minneapolis working as a freelance journalist, reporting on climate change, health care and criminal justice.