A Thursday evening (Oct. 25) public forum focused on poverty and news media coverage of it will feature a pair of reporters who were 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalists for a series they wrote on poverty in Chattanooga, TN.
The forum, titled “Building Trust: Eau Claire and Its Journalists Engage on Poverty,” is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Riverfront Room (Room 124) at the Pablo Center at the Confluence. It is the final public event in Eau Claire’s “Beyond the Headlines” series, which is part of a five-city program of the Wisconsin Humanities Council.
Program will include small group discussions
The Thursday program will include small group discussions and an opportunity to pose questions about poverty and journalism in Eau Claire. The panel discussion will feature Joan Garrett McClane and Joy Lukachick Smith, who co-wrote the Chattanooga Times Free Press series highlighting that city’s poverty that was a 2017 Pulitzer finalist in the Explanatory Reporting category.
Others on the panel will be Dominique Brossard, co-director of the research group Science, Media and the Public at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Sarah Ferber, an organizer for Chippewa Valley EXPO (EX-Incarcerated People Organizing). Eau Claire Leader-Telegram reporter Julian Emerson will moderate the discussion.
The event is free and open to the public. Advance registration is requested here to ensure adequate seating. The program will include opportunities for attendees to interact with the speakers and one another in examining both the news media’s role in developing an informed public and how – and whether – this has been done in regard to poverty in the Chippewa Valley.
Panelists’ backgrounds
McClane has been a staff writer for the Chattanooga paper since 2007. Before becoming the paper’s project editor, she covered business, higher education and the court system. Her recent focus has been investigative and narrative pieces on everything from gang culture to suicide to the child welfare system.
Smith is now a special projects reporter for GateHouse Media Iowa. For nearly a decade, she uncovered corruption and wrote about crime and politics for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, where she and McClane were Pulitzer finalists for their series on the city’s rising income inequality.
Brossard is professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the UW-Madison and an affiliate of its Robert & Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and of the UW-Madison Center for Global Studies and the Morgridge Institute for Research.
Sarah Ferber, an Eau Claire resident, has experienced poverty, homelessness, incarceration, and everything in between. After hitting rock bottom, community resource connections helped her to re-establish her life. Ferber is now an incessant advocate for change, challenging the Eau Claire community to rethink the way it views substance use disorder and incarceration.
Emerson has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for the past 25 years, most of that time at the Leader-Telegram. He has written about many topics, including poverty and homelessness and his stories on an array of poverty-related topics have won multiple state and national awards. He is a member of the committee that planned and implemented “Beyond the Headlines.”
That project aims to bring state residents together for discussions that explore journalism’s crucial role in enabling productive citizen engagement in American democracy. It is funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the Pulitzer Prizes.
Similar programs are running in Wausau, Madison, Superior and Milwaukee. More information on these programs can be found at https://beyondtheheadlineswisconsin.org/about.
Note: the CVPost is among the local news organizations participating in “Beyond the Headlines” and its Board chair, David Gordon, is a member of the project’s steering committee.