When your local reporter needs the same protection as a war correspondent

 Via Poynter

Five months of covering ICE raids taught our small LA newsroom hard lessons — and we're still figuring out how to sustain it

By: Michelle Zenarosa
November 6, 2025

When federal immigration operations began sweeping across Los Angeles in June, our newsroom worked around the clock. I didn’t have to tell them to. No one wanted to stop.

One reporter’s family members were being followed. Another staffer’s family went into hiding — despite having legal status. Sources we’d cultivated for years suddenly wouldn’t answer calls. At LA Public Press, a 14-person nonprofit newsroom led by and largely staffed by people of color who grew up in the neighborhoods we cover, everyone on staff was personally touched by the raids in some way. We weren’t covering some abstract story happening to other people. We were covering home.

By July, I had to force people to take weekends off. Soon after, every other Friday became mandatory time away. The story hasn’t stopped, but boundaries are harder to draw when you’re covering what’s happening to your own family.

It took us weeks to realize we were facing the same dangers as foreign correspondents in conflict zones — the threat of violence, retaliation and the exhaustion of sustained trauma coverage. But we didn’t have their security teams, legal protections or institutional support. --click for full article

Reporting under fire: Protests and press freedom in Los Angeles, a virtual webinar event with Freedom of the Press Foundation

 Via Freedom Of The Press Foundation

Wednesday, July 9, 3 p.m. EDT/12 p.m. PDT

Webinar Registration - Zoom

Journalists covering recent demonstrations in California have been assaulted, detained, shot with crowd-control munitions, and had their equipment searched — simply for doing their jobs.

Freelance and independent reporters are especially vulnerable, yet they continue to document how immigration raids impact communities and how law enforcement responds to civil unrest. Some of the journalists joining us are also plaintiffs in lawsuits pushing back against police actions that threaten press freedom and violate the First Amendment. 

Join us to hear their firsthand accounts and learn what it means to uphold the public’s right to know in the streets and on the front lines. 

If you cannot attend, help protect the rights of these journalists and defend press freedom everywhere by making a donation to support our work at this link.

On July 9th, we’ll be joined by:

- Adam Rose, Press rights chair and secretary at LA Press Club

- Ben Camacho, Journalist and co-founder of The Southlander

- Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, Independent videographer

- Tina-Desiree Berg, Journalist for Status Coup and other outlets

- Caitlin Vogus, Freedom of the Press Foundation senior adviser

Grieve The Loss Of Local Newspapers During Photojournalism Exhibition At Milwaukee Art Museum

 

Via Forbes

January 30, 2025

Grieve The Loss Of Local Newspapers During Photojournalism Exhibition At Milwaukee Art Museum

"Between 2005 and 2023, more than 2,200 weekly newspapers have shuttered, dropping from nearly 9,000 to roughly 6,000 according to research conducted at Northwestern University. Imagine if the same statistic held true for hospitals. Newspapers care for the health of American democracy as surely as hospitals do its physical health....

Worse still, at the same time, 43,000 newspaper journalist jobs have been eliminated, nearly two-thirds! Imagine any other industry critical to American society, the American way of life, and American democracy losing two thirds of its workers in less than 20 years. There’d be congressional hearings. The president would address the nation with a bold plan to reverse the trend...

Why are politicians and the public not crying over these job losses? Because journalists–the good ones–hold the powerful to account. Politicians, corporations, the wealthy. The powerful benefit when newspapers close or reduce coverage. Citizens lose....

An exhibition on view through March 16, 2025, at the Milwaukee Art Museum demonstrates how photographers have understood and wielded the power of images to convey events. Through more than 100 objects, “True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media,” offers a window into a bygone past of robust, objective, professional news coverage in America focused on the picture makers...

Photographs previously offered incontrovertible proof of what journalists were telling their readers. Thanks to technology, the public can no longer believe its eyes.

Filling the void left by the evisceration of newspapers has been partisan cable news commentators shrieking talking points 24/7/365, masquerading opinion as news, perspective as information, and, increasingly, social media."

True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media at the Milwaukee Art Museum