This writer and storyteller joins our team to support in writing fundraising materials and crafting a voice for City Bureau.
By Louise Macaraniag
Portrait taken by Caroline Olsen
We are excited to welcome Tyra Bosnic to the team as City Bureau’s first Lead Development Writer.
Tyra is a Chicago-born and raised writer who brings a breadth of writing experience to City Bureau. Throughout her career, Tyra has always been a writer and storyteller, whether it's reporting about music, culture or politics, or speechwriting for government officials. Tyra’s writing has been featured in a variety of publications; from Al Jazeera to Teen Vogue, she brings a wide range of writing styles. As a speechwriter for Lt. Governor Julia Stratton, Tyra was able to find her footing in the political sphere while continuing to pursue her love of writing. Now she finds herself at the intersection of both journalism and civic engagement at City Bureau. As our Lead Development Writer, Tyra works alongside our Development team in supporting and sustaining our programs to help us build a movement around participatory, local media.
We asked Tyra to share a little bit about her experiences, background and what she’s bringing to the role. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity.
You have an eclectic background in journalism work, from reporting to speech-writing. Can you tell us more about that journey and what ultimately led you to City Bureau?
My path has taken a lot of turns that I haven't expected but the cumulative impact of all of them has been really making me learn the value of storytelling and how we communicate with people.
City Bureau has always been this fixture around me, even back in college when I was working at the Columbia Chronicle, my college newspaper. I was around Documenters and Civic Reporting fellows like Andrea Salcedo. I was religiously reading the Notebook blog and just following the progress of City Bureau after it launched, because I really believed in the mission. Even though I couldn't participate myself at the time, this work taught me a lot about who I wanted to be as a writer and how I wanted to inform other people.
I worked in the Lieutenant Governor's office after I was freelancing for a few years, and that was a really eye-opening experience in how it showed me the different ways you can utilize the power of storytelling to enact good and to have a positive impact in Illinois communities that have historically been marginalized by policies. That's all about connecting with communities, being in the spaces with them and listening to them. So when this opportunity at City Bureau came up, it just seemed like such a perfect fit for me because I really admired everything that City Bureau had been doing, and I felt like I'd really built up this repertoire of utilizing the power of words.
How do you approach your work as a writer, and specifically in development?
I think a big thing that is really core to all the work I've done is that I'm not special, and in some ways, no writer or journalist is special. It's more just about how expansive this tool is. I was lucky to have the resources and the support to really pursue this field. Now I'm in a place where what guides me is how we could get these tools into everybody's hands and really bring out the greatness in everyone in every neighborhood. I get so much joy from being a writer and getting to share that with other people, whether it's sharing those tools or sharing stories.
Even though I'm not a journalist anymore, journalism is still core to who I am because it's core to all of us. And if we want to solve the problems that are impacting us politically, socially, socioeconomically, journalism has to be part of that conversation at all stages because it is a reflection of who we are. For too long journalism has been an industry of gatekeeping versus group project by all of us that takes in all of our experiences and all of our insights. I'm just really grateful to be around other people who see those institutional inequities and are working to do something about it. I think it's really easy to be cynical at this point when we see the state of journalism as a profession, but at City Bureau, we see this as a window of opportunity.
As for the fundraising and building support aspect of my work, I am so honored to play a role in sustaining City Bureau and getting people to join a movement that's about more accessible journalism that's built by and for people, and getting them to be a part of a whole new approach to journalism itself.
Tell us about your connection to Chicago, the [city] you call home.
Every Chicagoan has a complicated relationship to the city. I've lived here, on the Northwest Side, my entire life. In a lot of ways, there are separate versions of the city depending on where you live, and to really appreciate the full breadth of Chicago, including the problems in the city and how we want to address them, you have to be in the entire city, not just one neighborhood, not just one part. I was really lucky to have family and networks that span from the farthest part of the North Side to the South Side and the West Side, where I could really experience and gain a better understanding of the city in its entirety. And at the end of the day, it's the heartland for me, my family, and the people I love. And if you love something as much as I love the city of Chicago, you want to see it become better.
What’s something that keeps you grounded in your own work?
What keeps me grounded are people who aren't familiar with our work. Talking to friends, family members, and people who haven't heard about City Bureau about what we do, and seeing the excitement when I explain the programs we have and opening their eyes to the possibilities that are out there. That really grounds me and inspires me to come back to this work with that feeling I have in conversations of why I want to do this, and that guides how I approach the storytelling element in my role.
To connect with Tyra, feel free to reach out at tyra@citybureau.org.
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