By Elizabeth Tharakan >> The number of full-time statehouse reporters who cover capital cities has declined 34% since 2014. To fill this gap, college students are providing a substantial amount of statehouse coverage, including in Illinois and Missouri. There are now 34 university- or college-led statehouse reporting initiatives in 30 states across the country, according
By Elizabeth Tharakan >> Iowa is one of the leading states for book bans in America, second only to Florida, according to PEN America. Earlier this year, Iowa’s state Board of Education adopted the rules for a sweeping 2023 education law. The law — and the rules that enforce it — ban “sexual content” in
By Elizabeth Tharakan >> The Marshall Project opened a local nonprofit newsroom in St. Louis to support local media with investigative and data journalism about the criminal justice system. St. Louis is the third city in the New York-based Marshall Project’s local network. The other two are Clevaland and Jackson, Mississippi. “This newsroom is several
By Elizabeth Tharakan >> National news organizations embolden President Donald Trump to sue them when they pay out million dollar settlements to Trump when his legal claims are weak and probably would fail in court. That is the consensus of media lawyers and scholars. The media organizations are surrendering the legal protections that New York
By Elizabeth Tharakan When the St. Louis Reparations Commission presented its first proposal last week to begin to address systemic racial discrimination against Black residents of the city, it drew on pioneering reparations programs in California and in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, which has already disbursed more than $1 million in funds since its
