The Advocate Journalist

As an advocate, Dara Lind constantly found herself correcting DC journalists. Now, she works as an expert immigration writer at Vox.

When Ezra Klein emailed Dara Lind in early 2014, she was five years into her advocacy career in DC. At the time, Lind was looking into master’s degrees in public policy, sociology, or criminology to get into think-tank work; Klein was looking for an expert journalist for his soon-to-launch news website Vox.

“If I had felt that journalism on immigration was solid, I wouldn’t have wanted to go into it,” Lind explains. But as an advocate, she felt that she was constantly trying to correct DC journalists who mistook political statements for policy. For example, during the first several years of the Obama administration, there was a general assumption among journalists that Obama had rolled back immigration enforcement. But still, over 400,000 people were being deported each year and immigrants were just as afraid of being deported, if not more so, than they had been under Bush.

Unknowingly setting herself up for a career at Vox, Lind spent most of her career contextualizing complex immigration issues for outside audiences. When activists disproportionately focused on the shortcomings of passed legislation during the 2013 Senate bill, she produced materials that pointed to the bill’s successes. By highlighting the bill’s less flashy yet meaningful advancements, Lind showed fellow advocates the importance of taking ownership for reform successes.

As someone with a passion for explaining complex issues in simple terms, writing journalistically came naturally to Lind. At the start of her advocacy career in DC, she actively tried to keep an “iron in the fire” for a journalism career. But when she applied for a fellowship at a DC-based liberal magazine, her lack of reporting experience held her back.

After a few further fruitless attempts, Lind decided that gaining reporting experience wasn’t worth sacrificing a job she loved and, ultimately, she preferred working in immigration in some capacity than being a journalist who didn’t. As an alternative, Lind guest-blogged about immigration, criminal justice, and gender norms for progressive political bloggers liked Spencer Ackerman, and she also wrote for Matt Yglesias, who is now an executive editor at Vox.

As of early 2014, Lind was set on pursuing a career that would let her explain complicated systems to interested people, but didn’t expect to be doing it as an employee of a media outlet. “I was treating my Twitter account as my best way to lift up and explain important goings-on in immigration for the public,” which is ultimately how Lind caught Klein’s attention.

Klein followed Lind on Twitter and she recalled him citing her clear writing and thinking on policy matters. He soon persuaded the passionate advocate that her time would be better served by going into journalism. As a journalist, he explained, she would be able to take what she was already doing on Twitter in terms of explaining policy to a broader audience.

Lind agreed and started working as an immigration and criminal justice writer for Vox in March 2014. When it became clear that immigration was going to be a popping political issue at the upcoming election, Lind joined the politics team. As a Vox journalist, Lind writes with a clear point of view, unconfined by the old traditions of objectivity or “elected-official-says-x political journalism.”

For the upcoming election, Lind sees various immigration scenarios playing out. She recently argued that Republicans will suffer the loss of even more Latino voters in 2016 if candidates get sucked into supporting 2012 nominee Mitt Romney’s call for “self-deportation.” And if Democratic contender Hillary Clinton continues to be tone-deaf on immigration, she wrote, Democrats will also suffer a loss in Latino votes. Leading up to the elections, Lind looks forward to drawing her readers’ attention to behind the scenes policy and campaign-shaping statements that central politicians should be held accountable for.

This notion of accountability has become increasingly relevant for journalists, as well. At Vox, journalists use social media to add context and interact with their readers. As part of any large feature release, Vox journalists host Q&A sessions on Facebook, AMAs on Reddit, and interact with their viewership on Twitter. “We’re holding ourselves out as experts and making sure that our readers can ask questions and see us as a resource.”

As someone who considers comment sections “uniformly terrible,” Lind was positively surprised after she hosted her first Immigration Q&A on VOX’s Facebook page in June 2014. Unlike typical troll-laden comment sections, interested readers asked Lind well-researched questions and wanted answers. “It’s been really gratifying to see that when it’s us as a resource rather than us hosting a discussion, it’s much better use of a journalist’s time.”

And, according to Lind, journalism continues to benefit from social media. While she agrees with critics that social media makes parts of journalism redundant, she believes that it mainly affects the “boring, stenography kind of journalism.” She is optimistic that he-said-she-said journalism may even cease to exist in the future — a development that leaves Lind hopeful.

As politicians increasingly reach out to their followers on Twitter and Facebook directly, journalists no longer need to spend their time quoting politicians’ daily speech recitals. Instead, they can take a bigger picture approach and investigate what’s going on behind the scenes.

Whether or not Lind will stay in journalism depends on how many outlets push for journalists to take less time working as political transcription puppets. For now, she agrees with Klein that her time is well served as a journalist. “Finally, there is more emphasis on doing some digging, talking to other people, and finding the messages that politicians wouldn’t want to get out to their followers themselves…which is probably good for democracy in the long-run.”