The Madison Common Council formally established the Police Civilian Oversight Board last September. The 13-member board was years in the making, and intended to bring more oversight and accountability to the Madison Police Department.
Now, it’s the subject of a federal lawsuit against the City of Madison. My report for WORT News.
Read on wortfm.org. Picture of demonstration on May 30, 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.
Bayview is one of the oldest affordable housing communities in Madison. Recently, they unveiled a $50 million redevelopment plan to increase their housing capacity and build a new community center. I attended the groundbreaking ceremony for WORT News.
Top Michigan officials – including former governor Rick Snyder – were indicted on charges that ranged from willful neglect of duty and involuntary manslaughter to obstruction of justice after a new investigation into the Flint water crisis.
It’s a crisis that combined a city’s fiscal distress with politics and ignorance of environmental factors to create disaster: lead poisoning, and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease.
I took a deep dive into the history and the details of the Flint water crisis with ProPublica journalist Anna Clark, author of the book The Poisoned City.
Black babies in Wisconsin die at a higher rate than any other state.
And nationally, Black mothers die in childbirth at a rate that’s three times greater than that of white mothers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of those deaths are preventable.
Those racial inequities for women and children are why hundreds marched in downtown Madison on Saturday. Protestors marched from the Wisconsin State Capitol to Meriter Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital, where organizers described their own experiences, and demanded change.
The march, titled “We Been Not Breathin’,” was the eighth day of continuous Black Lives Matter protests in Madison in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
Read on wortfm.org. This report received a gold award in the Milwaukee Press Club’s 2020 Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism Awards.
Vivian Maier was a street photographer in the latter half of the 20th century, capturing intricacies of daily life at a time when camera culture and street photography was on the rise. Though Maier was extremely prolific as a photographer, she worked professionally as a nanny, often carrying several cameras around while she was working. A private person, she was largely unknown and undiscovered during most of her lifetime, but beginning close to her death in 2009, her archive was picked up by collectors in Chicago and her work quickly scattered online.
Pamela Bannos, Professor of Photography at Northwestern University, became interested in Maier’s life and work after a local public television station asked her to comment on the photographer’s work. Her biography is Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life And Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
As recorded for wortfm.org and Tone Madison.
Squeaky doors, the hum of traffic, overlapping conversations — they’re all a part of the soundscape of the Madison bus system. Also a part of that soundscape is the voice of Ward Paxton, who has been the literal voice of the transit system for more than a dozen years. My interview for wortfm.org.