I’m Luke DiStefano and I’ll be helping Mark with the newsletter for a while. I’m a student at The College of New Jersey majoring in Journalism & Professional Writing, with a minor in Creative Writing. Outside of this newsletter, I am the Nation & World editor at The Signal newspaper, and I am a published poet—with my poetry collection “the gentlemen gallery” available on Amazon.
On this episode of The Journalism Salute, Mark Simon spoke to Nicole Lewis, the engagement editor for the The Marshall Project—a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, with the belief that the system is broken and needs reform. Nicole has previously been an editor at Slate and a reporter at the Washington Post. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a masters from CUNY Newmark who was previously an editor at Slate..
Nicole represents one of the many unique kinds of journalism as engagement editor. Within the role of engagement editor she leads The Marshall Project's strategic efforts to deepen reporting that reaches communities most affected by the criminal legal system, and has also penned a number of stories for the website herself.
But beyond these more specialized endeavors, Nicole shows how journalism doesn't exist in a vacuum. In fact, arguably, journalism is the field that is most affected by our modern contexts.
“How do I figure out what they're hungry for, how do I listen to them? How do I ask them good questions about what's confusing? What are the things that they're struggling with on a day-to-day basis?” she said.
Take one story, an as-told-to, she wrote with a woman whose prenatal care was delayed while being held at a Texas jail, and therefore miscarried as a result. With the recent push and pull of abortion and of general maternal rights within America, telling stories such as these are important from more than just a truth-telling perspective. The truth, in this case, matters because of the context it carries within the larger discussion.
Journalism can often be misunderstood to be unfeeling or even removed. This could not be further from the truth, and cases like Nicole make this evident. While journalists are called to be truthful in their reporting, their intent behind what stories they choose to take on can be motivated for all the right reasons.
“Tell stories and provide news and information for the people at the center of those investigations,” she said. “How can you actually arm people with information that allows them to take some sort of action in their life?”
Sometimes highlighting stories such as these can prevent future tragedies of a similar nature. Nicole shows us that speaking to power doesn’t always have to be fact-checking powerful figures, and rather can often simply mean having empathy for someone’s story and letting them use you as a mouthpiece to tell it.
Stories have weight to them, and with cases such as this, some perspectives can be crucial when we are deliberating social issues as a society.
What happens to expecting inmates is not something one immediately thinks or cares about, but through covering stories like these, journalists can not only tell the truth, but also uplift the stories of those in our society that are often not considered when we’re debating these difficult topics.
In this way, “It's an act. It's a very active process,” Nicole said, as if a mission statement for her role as a journalist.
Nicole’s salute: Outlier Media, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to Detroiter’s needs, and New York Magazine