Tag: media

Journalism collaborations help produce community impact, policy solutions

When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit, weekly and smaller newspapers scrambled to provide coverage of the huge global story affecting their readerships even though they had much smaller staff and fewer resources than the city’s larger media outlets. But for publications like the South Side Weekly, Wednesday Journal and Loop North News in and around…

‘Publishers can only do so much by themselves’

Growing up in rural Iowa, Becky Vonnahme didn’t have access to many local news sources. Now, as part-time executive director of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, Vonnahme has discovered why. Small publications, like small businesses, have a hard time getting funded. After all, ad sales alone just don’t support local journalism anymore. The foundation works…

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s unconstitutional attack on the press

From afar, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s attempt to prosecute a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter looks like the folly of a vindictive politician who doesn’t understand computers or the First Amendment. But it is more serious than that. A governor trying to prosecute a journalist for reporting publicly available information poses a serious threat to press…

Post-Ferguson police reform stalls among racial divisions

ST. LOUIS – Ferguson became the Selma of the 21st century after Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown seven years ago. Protests transformed Black Lives Matter from a hashtag into the nation’s leading civil rights movement and forged a potent political coalition that elected Black reformers to top St. Louis offices, from prosecutor to congresswoman…