Many life updates
What I've been up to the past few months
Hi friends,
It’s been a minute. I’m writing because I want to catch you up on some major life updates, and also to ask for your help.
1) After getting laid off from HuffPost last March, I recently started a job at a brand new non-profit news outlet, called New York Focus. We’re a small but mighty team of four full-time employees, and I’m serving as executive editor, spearheading our fundraising, growth and editorial strategy efforts. Our goal is to fill an urgent gap in the New York news ecosystem: as local news outlets have been cut to the bone, there’s a dire lack of investigative and accountability-driven coverage focused on statewide policy. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I assume you’re at least somewhat invested in my work, which is why I’m asking for your support.
We need the help of readers to help stay in business. A few weeks ago, we launched a membership program, and through Dec. 31 – with the help of an initiative called NewsMatch and a generous local donor – every donation will get triple matched, going 3x as far. If you have the ability to donate (https://www.nysfocus.com/joinus/), I would so appreciate it.
Over the past few months, our stories have led to bills being signed into law and long-delayed data getting released. We’ve shaped public discourse on topics like state budget negotiations and the crisis at Rikers. Our reporting has been discussed in city and state legislative hearings and cited in many dozens of national and local publications. And we’re just getting started.
2) I’m still education freelancing! I’m working on a yearlong series with The Fuller Project and FiveThirtyEight about teachers during COVID, and my first piece came out today. It’s about the teacher shortage that wasn’t. If you might recall, last spring and over the summer, a spate of articles and surveys warned that anywhere from 25 – 50% of teachers were thinking of leaving their jobs. Only that hasn’t panned out, at all, even amid ‘the great resignation.’ Another interesting layer to this: a disproportionate amount of women have been dropping out of the workforce, and while teaching is a primarily female profession, it has still been largely insulated from this trend.
This doesn’t mean that labor shortages in other parts of the education system aren’t real. In September I did a piece for Marketplace in September about how schools are short on cafeteria workers, and how that is keeping kids from getting healthy school lunches.
3) I am very, very, very pregnant. I have two pieces coming out in the next few weeks, but other than that, I will be off the journalism grid for the next few months =]