The Objective

Photo of a billboard in North St. Louis by Adam Mahoney, shared with permission from Capital B. I have a simple answer for why I became an environmental journalist: George Floyd was murdered. It was 2020, and I had just graduated from college. After a stretch of unpaid and underpaid internships in Chicago, I found a job listing at Grist, an online climate magazine, to cover environmental justice.

Collage by James Salanga. Illustration by Colleen Tighe, provided courtesy of the National Writers Union. In 2020, the National Writers Union’s Freelance Solidarity Project (NWU-FSP) launched the Rate Sharing Database, asking freelance media workers to enter as many of their pay rates as possible.

Collage by James Salanga. Background of confiscated phones by the Mississippi Department of Corrections; edited photo of the Baldwin State Prison in Georgia via Wikimedia Commons; edited photo of a phone via Pexels; screenshot of FCC headline on a release about a proposal to limit certain cellphone signals in prisons. Incarcerated journalists risk their lives to reveal the horrible truth about Georgia’s prison system to the world.

Previous e-edition covers from Vida en el Valle and El Nuevo Herald accessed via the Wayback Machine. Collage by James Salanga. The latest round of McClatchy layoffs, announced Sept. 11, eliminated several papers’ capacity for Spanish-language reporting in areas where Latine communities make up the majority of the population or are the second most populous demographic group.

Edits by James Salanga. Photo of the New York Times office via ; X vector via Clipart Craft. Trans News Network is calling for a public boycott of the New York Times, including Times productslike the Games and Cooking apps and refusing to click on links to reporting published in the piece: “No excuses, no exceptions … This boycott will no longer be necessary when the NYT stops pushing [the] genocide [of trans people].” The trans-led non-profit newsroom published their announcement Aug.

Collage by James Salanga. Elements include a photo of (formerly known as San Quentin State Prison), California prison media access bills from 1999 and 2005, and articles about , Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom vetoing prison media access bills. Over the past five years, Steven Brooks has faced write-ups, accusations by prison staff, a ban from the prison media center, and dismissal from his role of editor-in-chief of San Quentin News.

Collage by James Salanga. Photo of Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore; photo of journalists at 2014 N3Con courtesy of the Asian American Journalist Association’s Asia chapter. This year’s N3Con in Bangkok was a shadow of its former self. Once attended by upwards of 300 attendees — Asia-based journalists and editors writing for American or European media — the latest conference’s attendance fell to less than half that number.

A quote from the USA Today Co. newspaper unions’ statement against the USA Today Co.-Palantir partnership, via the NewsGuild-CWA, atop a photo of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement visit at Canton, Mississippi, in 2019.

Collage by James Salanga. Headline via Axios, air purifier image via . At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many access needs — like remote and hybrid work, which disabled people had been long asking for — became the norm across journalism and other industries.

Despite industry uncertainty, historically Black colleges and universities have offered respite for Black student journalists, including me. My classes at Tuskegee University centered the Black experience as the status quo — I was part of the majority living in a world where I would always remain the minority.