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10 Journalists Chosen for Fellowships
on Urban Environmental Justice
LOS ANGELES (April 9, 2009) – Ten U.S. journalists have been chosen by USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism (IJJ) to take part in a fellowship program to enable them to report on the complexities of urban environmental justice with clarity, depth and context.
Fellowship conference sessions will be held in Los Angeles and Chicago, and experts will help the journalists relate urban environmental conditions witnessed in those two cities to conditions in their home cities.
The 10 Fellows all work for ethnic media organizations or are independent journalists who regularly cover ethnic communities or issues of racial justice. They are:
- Edwin Buggage, editor-in-chief/writer, New Orleans Data News Weekly
- Lori Edmo-Suppah, news editor, Sho-Ban News, Fort Hall, Idaho
- Nadra Kareem, contributing writer, L.A. Watts Times, Los Angeles
- Kari Lyderson, independent journalist, Chicago
- Brentin Mock, writing fellow, The American Prospect, Washington, D.C.
- Julio Cesar Ortiz, news reporter, KMEX-34 (Univision), Los Angeles
- Fabiola Pomareda, reporter, La Raza newspaper, Chicago
- Devin Robins, radio producer, Los Angeles
- Huascar Robles, arts and culture editor, Metro San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Talia Whyte, freelance journalist, Boston
The program is funded by a grant from the McCormick Foundation. Its goal is to contribute to the professional development of participating journalists and to improve the quality of coverage of urban environmental justice issues. Each selected journalist will produce an in-depth project story or a series of shorter stories that will draw from the fellowship experience.
The completed work, to be featured on IJJ’s Web site, “will help inform both policymakers and the public about significant issues relating to urban environmental justice,” said IJJ Director Steve Montiel.
The program will encourage focused reporting on the connections between environmental hazards, such as air pollution, and race/economic class. In a 2007 study of major urban areas, Los Angeles was ranked first with the most people of color living near hazardous waste facilities. Chicago was ranked fourth.
The opening program will begin in Los Angeles on April 30, with the 10 Fellows and five of their editors participating in a weeklong conference. On May 1, they will participate in a Justice and Journalism “immersion” conference on the intersections between economic issues and environmental justice. That conference, at USC’s Davidson Conference Center, will also be open to other journalists, students and guests. Over the next five days, the Fellows and editors will meet with experts on environmental justice and take part in workshops on digital media, computer-assisted reporting tools, and access to public information and journalistic ethics. In addition, varied field reporting experiences will give the journalists on-the-ground perspectives about issues in Los Angeles.
The program’s second part is scheduled for Chicago on July 25-30, with up to 10 invited Chicago journalists joining the 10 ethnic media Fellows. The participants and IJJ staff members will take part in reviews of the Fellows’ projects, as well as in field reporting, workshops and in-depth discussions with experts. Some of the sessions will be held at Columbia College Chicago.
In addition to Montiel, other journalists leading the fellowship program are Associate Directors Frank Sotomayor and Marc Cooper and Janet Wilson, IJJ Senior Fellow for Environmental Justice.
The McCormick Foundation is committed to strengthening the nation’s free, democratic society by investing in children, communities and country. It was established as a charitable trust in 1955, upon the death of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. In 2008, the foundation funded IJJ fellowships on immigration for ethnic media journalists.
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