Within the spring of 2021, MIT Technology Analysis launched a fellowship centered on exploring the slightly an extraordinarily good deal of systems whereby skills and records were being aged to accommodate complications with inequality at some level of the pandemic.
With the back of the Heising-Simons Foundation—a Los Altos and San Francisco, California-primarily based totally totally family foundation that supports initiatives centered on native weather and clear energy, neighborhood and change, education, human rights, and science—our call aimed to win journalists who would perchance well file thoughtfully and with insight into the systematic, technological, and challenges covid has dropped at below-covered communities. Fellows every receive at the least $7,500 to behavior their work and the chance to post in the arena’s oldest skills e-newsletter.
We are proud to relate the recipients of the fellowship are:
LaVonne Roberts, an fair journalist covering science, health, and skills from New York, will likely be writing about the rollout of immersive, excessive-tech recharge rooms for health mavens as a pilot procedure expands from docs to slightly an extraordinarily good deal of frontline clinic workers. Her work stood out from the crowd, acknowledged the judges, with a clear impression and compelling short.
Elaine Shelly, a freelance writer and documentary maker primarily based totally totally in Georgia, is inspecting the impression of long covid on Gloomy Americans, and exploring how shall we better brand the illness and its cultural impacts. The judges hoped her work would perchance well possess in a lacking element of fresh pandemic coverage. “Focusing on the lives of Gloomy females—and her enjoy experience of long-term indicators of covid-19—Elaine Shelly’s reporting will dive into the overlapping burdens of continual illness, medical racism, and misogynoir,” they acknowledged.
Chandra Whitfield, a writer and multimedia journalist from Colorado, will likely be inspecting how Gloomy females were particularly plagued by the intersection of the pandemic and home abuse—and taking a see at derive related records. The judges acknowledged she had “known a needed public coverage topic” and crafted a proposal “with a procedure of motive and urgency.”
And our newsroom fellowship goes to Desire Chaney, who covers atmosphere and science at Montana’s Missoulian. Desire and his colleagues had been exploring the outcomes of covid response and a surge in federal monetary increase in Montana’s native communities, particularly in the Blackfeet Reservation. The judges agreed that his proposal was the “clear winner” in its class.
Evaluating entries was a panel of experienced journalists and researchers intimately conscious of the failings at stake: Alexis Madrigal, cohost of KQED public radio’s Discussion board; Krystal Tsotsie, a geneticist at Vanderbilt University and board member of the Native BioData Consortium; Impress Rochester, an experienced investigative journalist and managing editor of the San Diego nonprofit newsroom Inewsource; and Seema Yasmin, a journalist, medical physician, and director of the Stanford Health Conversation Initiative.