Shift Press fellows are receiving Chromebooks the City of Houston loaned us! This is making fellowship activities, like drafting pieces and joining Zoom workshops, much more accessible and painless for fellows. School is starting for many of our team members, so our schedules are changing. The fellowship team is also playing a bit of catch-up after sessions were cancelled due to Hurricane Laura. We have overcome this problem by synthesizing materials and offering additional support to our fellows in the case they need more assistance while we move a bit quicker through some of the presentation work. This way we can serve all of the fellows and cater to individual needs for those that need it most.
This week the Shift Press Fellows got to participate in their first newsroom day. My favorite pitch came from Yemi. Yemi wanted to write a story that questions what outcomes happen when marginalized people are represented. He explained that through his research he found concerning examples of people of color promoting policies that harm the communities that they come from. He really pushed people in the room to think about what diversity means and what it demands.
We onboarded more editors for our Open Pitch–we’re at close to 15 now.
The fellowship focused on root cause analysis this week. We taught students how to critically analyze issues they were interested in and how that affects the stories they are writing. For example, writing all the symptoms of an issue but never really getting to the causes of those symptoms