City Bureau welcomes reporters Alex Arriaga and Justin Agrelo to the team.
By Sarah Conway
City Bureau has some exciting news to share!
We are thrilled to announce our new Civic Reporting Residents: Alex Arriaga and Justin Agrelo. These tenacious Chicago reporters will cover community news as full-time residents on beats they’ll be developing over the next year at City Bureau.
As always, our Civic Reporting Residents’ focus will be reporting with and for communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides, to fill vital information needs about issues that impact them directly. Here, they’ll produce hard-hitting stories on a regular basis as well as create high-impact, direct-service editorial projects with input and assistance from the communities they aim to serve. Some call that engagement, but we just call it journalism.
Join us in welcoming our new 2020-2021 Civic Reporting Residents. Scroll down to learn more about Arriaga and Agrelo: find out about their news beats, what equity in news means to them and their plans for the next year.
Alex Arriaga (Photo by Zakkiyyah Najeebah)
Alex Arriaga
Meet Alex Arriaga, a journalist based in Pilsen, a neighborhood where much of her Mexican immigrant family lives. Her reporting focuses on how people engage and participate in democracy and how community reporting can empower that participation in different ways.
Tell us about your news beat: How immigrant communities build power and participate in democracy in Chicago.
I was initially inspired by the impact of the proposed citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Though it's since been removed, advocates still fear that the Trump administration’s actions may impact responses from immigrant communities. In fact, people still participate in and influence local government despite their exclusion due to immigration status or fear of immigration authorities—it reminded me that there is so much resilience in our communities.
This year, I’ll be closely following how local officials and advocacy organizations have adapted their outreach to encourage civic participation among Chicago’s diverse immigrant communities, and I’ll be documenting all the ways beyond voting that communities build power and participate in our democracy. I’ll be reporting for the same communities that I’m covering: immigrants who may feel vulnerable in the current political climate but who are still willing to put themselves out there.
City Bureau brings people together to produce media that is impactful and responsive to the public. What does equitable journalism in Chicago look like to you?
I moved back to Chicago two years ago to be closer to family in Pilsen. My community is a big part of who I am and my philosophy of wanting to do journalism here in my city. Equitable journalism in Chicago means helping people find information about their own communities and tap into their own networks to share that information, often in places where the media has broken trust in the past. They decide what news should be covered in their space and how it should be told. It is a journalism that values a community’s systems of communication just as much as the more traditional agendas in newsrooms.
What do you hope to get out of your year-long residency?
I’m interested in exploring journalism that prioritizes and makes time for community input throughout the journalism process. It’s a philosophy and practice that I plan to take with me into future newsrooms and reporting jobs.
How can people reach you with story ideas, tips and feedback on your beat and reporting?
You can email me at alex@citybureau.org, find me on Twitter at @alexarriaga__, or connect with me on the Signal app at +1 708-548-9088. (Signal is a secure, free encrypted messaging app that you can download here.)
Justin Agrelo (Photo by Zakkiyyah Najeebah)
Justin Agrelo
Meet Justin Agrelo, a queer, Puerto Rican journalist from Chicago’s Northwest side. He is a writer and storyteller working to make space for marginalized folks in predominating narratives by centering voices that are often overlooked by traditional media.
Tell us about your news beat: Who gets a say in housing and development in Chicago.
I grew up amid so much rapid development in Logan Square and Humboldt Park and I saw those communities change firsthand. If you are Puerto Rican or from a community of color in Chicago that has been gentrified there is sort of like, at least for me, this constant feeling of unfairness. It all feels unjust.
I spent the past eight months in Oakland, California, and that also inspired me to pitch City Bureau a beat focused on housing, development and social movements. When you go to Oakland or San Francisco, there are people fighting to stay there, and there is a vibrant history there, but you also meet a housing crisis and so many folks struggling to survive. And with that comes this inescapable collective nostalgia. You’re left wanting to meet the old Oakland or the old San Francisco because they sound so much more vibrant and alive and cool. But you can’t.
As a person of color from Chicago, I often wonder what will our city look like in 10 years? Will it be this new place where so few of us who are from here can actually afford to stay? Will we be able to recognize it?
Chicago has a new mayor who has run as a progressive and a reformer. We hear the rhetoric that we need to combat poverty on the South and West Sides. We need to keep folks here. But what is that in material terms? I am hoping to shed light on housing and development policy but also to capture Chicago at this moment in time. If Daley and Rahm accelerated the displacement of communities of color in our city, then today we are at a crossroads and we need to ask, who is this city really for?, both right now and in the near future.
What do you hope to get out of your year-long residency?
For the past two years, I’ve been jumping around in terms of my writing. Sometimes I write about music and culture and then I’ll pivot to colonialism in Puerto Rico. What I hope to get out of the Civic Reporting Residency is the opportunity to build and develop a beat over the next year. It is a complex and challenging one, but I know I’ll leave City Bureau with this skill while learning alongside communities.
City Bureau brings people together to produce media that is impactful and responsive to the public. What does equitable journalism in Chicago look like to you?
Oftentimes as journalists, we tell folks what should be important to them and what they need to know, not the other way around. It’s communities saying, “This is what news needs to be covered and which spotlights need to be shown,” while having the tools, the access and the space to tell their own stories.
It is also celebrating wins. When journalism is not equitable, communities of color only exist in the media in our tragedies, in the violence and the trauma we are forced to experience. We are rarely allowed to exist in joy, in triumph, or just as people. Equitable journalism, of course, is going to shed light on injustice and inequity, but it will also elevate stories that are so much more.
How can people reach you with story ideas, tips and feedback on your beat and reporting?
You can send me an email at justin@citybureau.org or find me on Twitter at @JstnAgrlo.
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