This Chicago South Sider and multimedia journalist and educator is joining our team to help us improve our editorial practices and support our fellowship community.
By Caroline Olsen
Arionne Nettles (Photo: zakkiyyah najeebah)
We’re excited to introduce the latest addition to the City Bureau team, our first Deputy Editor, Arionne Nettles. Arionne will act as an editor across the organization and manage our Civic Reporting Fellowship.
Arionne has worked as a multimedia reporter and editor, her work often exploring art’s cultural ties to issues such as mass incarceration and educational inequity. Most recently, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and was responsible for the publishing platform, Medill Reports.
With Arionne on board, we are excited to grow our content and publishing strategy and build better systems of support for emerging local journalists.
Here’s more about Arionne.
Tell us more about yourself and what drew you to City Bureau.
I am from the South Side, born and raised. I talk about Chicago probably more than I talk about anything else, and I was drawn to City Bureau’s local reporting and focus on community. Traditionally, journalism has operated as an industry where we go out and we seek stories, not always understanding that perhaps, if we better equip people to tell their own stories, we could all share information in a better way. I look at working at City Bureau as mission work for me because I love the city, and I want all the people that I care about to be more engaged in news.
Also the training aspect of City Bureau is really essential. I was a career changer, so I know what it's like to come into journalism later in life and how difficult it can be. I look at the fellowship program as something I could have benefitted from myself. We always talk about diversity in journalism, but we don't, as an industry, do a good job of giving people opportunities. When we talk about adding a diversity of voices to the industry, that means we also need to have more flexible options for training journalists outside of the traditional path. Getting to train and mentor journalists of all ages that are coming into this new stage of their career is something that's really exciting for me. I love to teach more than I even love to write, and I have a lot of ideas about how we teach journalism and how that can be different. To be able to expand the practice and really contribute to our community of journalists is just an amazing opportunity. It’s the perfect balance because I get to teach and I get to do journalism, and those two things are really what drive me, so I'm really excited to be here.
Can you talk more about your past journalism experience and how you see that transferring to your role on the City Bureau team?
I’ve worked at a few newsrooms across Chicago. I was an editor at the Chicago Defender and at the Associated Press. I was a digital producer at WBEZ before working full-time at Northwestern teaching journalism. Journalism education was always a dream of mine. My mother is a Chicago Public Schools teacher and I have a lot of people in my family who are teachers. In my education work, I’ve been really focusing on improving how we teach, how we create curriculum and how we share information with the people who then go share more information. And I'm excited to bring that to City Bureau because if there's anything I would say that I've worked really, really hard on in the past couple years, it’s being a good teacher.
What makes you most excited about this new role of Deputy Editor?
City Bureau is growing in the most exciting way right now. Across programs and across the organization, there's just going to be even more opportunities—more publishing, more content strategy, more opportunities to up our ante. I'm excited to be joining at a time where a lot of these bigger strategic decisions are already in motion, and I'm just hopping on the train, ready to go. I’m looking forward to being able to add my voice, think through how we can better serve our community and support everything in the pipeline already. Helping and adding strength to what we’re already doing feels really exciting.
Tell me more about your relationship with Chicago.
I grew up in Englewood, then my family moved to West Pullman where my parents still live, and now I'm in Roseland. Growing up, Chicago was my playground. I kind of went everywhere because I grew up on 68th Street and my mom lived on 129th Street—that just gave me a whole lot of miles to play. I've lived in other places: I went to school in Tallahassee, Florida, I lived in Atlanta and Memphis, but I've never even visited a city like Chicago. I probably get into trouble about Chicago, because if someone talks poorly about it, it's like talking about my family member, and I am ready to argue or do whatever. That’s also something that's very Chicago, we fight for our city. And I think that plays into our work and what we do as journalists. We are critical of this place because we love it, we keep people in power accountable because we want it to be better. You have to have a strong love for a place to do this kind of work, because you have to care so much about the injustice that you're willing to do what you need to do to make it better. If you love something, you fight for it to be better.
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