Civil Weekly Newsletter: 1/4/2019 Edition
We want to hear from you, newsrooms!
As we approach our public launch next month, we’re preparing to onboard and announce new newsrooms that have indicated interest in joining Civil’s growing community. If you (or somebody you know) run a newsroom and want to join Civil, visit civil.co and enter your email here.
If you’re an existing newsroom with a proven track record of producing great journalism, there’s no added cost. You’ll be able to join and network with a community of world-class newsrooms, get discounted rates on third-party goods and services and access a suite of digital publishing tools that allow you to permanently archive your work in a tamper-proof manner.
The first step is to get in touch, and we’ll walk you through the process from there. And before you know it, you’ll be creating your own Newsroom Smart Contract!
Ready to learn more? You can do so here.
Here’s what Civil Newsrooms wrote about this week.
Congratulations to Block Club Chicago for being awarded a $150,000 grant over two years to expand coverage in several Chicago neighborhoods. Learn what this means for local news in Chicago — and what you can do to support their efforts — by subscribing to their newsletter.
Here are a few highlights from Civil Newsrooms this week:
- After the 2018 election in the United States, climate change emerged as a top priority in Congress. The Colorado Sun takes a look into what role the regulation of greenhouse gases in the oil and gas industry will have on 2019 legislation in Colorado.
- When they lost everything to Hurricane Maria, a couple moved to Chicago to open an imported Turkish lamp store, reports Block Club Chicago. Now, their store is the light of their Portage Park neighborhood.
- Approximately 35,000 non-U.S. citizens currently serve in the U.S. military with the explicit understanding that they’ll be naturalized as citizens during or immediately after their service. But some of these veterans are deported before they receive their citizenship. Groundtruth Project published a powerful photo essay that captured some of these veterans’ stories.
- U.S. Representative Kathy Castor, the chair of the new Select Committee on Climate Crisis, has a green voting record. But Sludge found that she also owns up to $100,000 of investments in a fossil fuel-burning utilities mutual fund. Read the investigation.
- South Bronx United is helping dozens of undocumented students prepare for college, play soccer and become legal U.S. residents. Read some of these students’ stories, and how the program came about, in Documented.
- CEU, the prestigious American university in Hungary, offers students classes in the humanities and social sciences taught exclusively in English. Now, the university is being pushed out of the country. A former student describes the rough political circumstances surrounding this issue in Popula.
- “Louis C.K. isn’t in trouble for making edgy jokes,” argues Tom Scocca in Hmm Daily. Read what the author says people are actually laughing at when the comedian performs.
- A.J. Daulerio spent his first sober New Years Eve standing in his kitchen with a hammer in his hand, looking at an inflatable hot tub that cost him almost a full month’s rent that he’d purchased before going to rehab. In his brutally honest account published in The Small Bow, the author recounts the hoops he almost jumped through to avoid the day all together.
- Since 2011, New York State as given yearly grants of millions of dollars to regional organizations. In 2018, the Hudson Valley and Albany received over $100 million. The River looks at what this could do to the region’s local — and increasingly fractured — economy.
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- Colombia y los Estados Unidos renuevan su compromiso contra el narcotráfico en Venezuela, informe 14ymedio.
Interested in starting your own Civil Newsroom? Learn how you can join the Civil community. Or, for a daily feed from Civil Newsrooms, follow @CivilStories on Twitter.
The Random Musing Section
I didn’t set a formal New Year’s resolution this year, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Now seems as good a time as any; I think the window for declaring one’s New Year’s resolution is just about to shut. So, I’m going to dust off an old one that I adopted for a while, then abandoned for some reason: stop reading my phone in bed. I won’t read my phone before bed, after I wake up and, especially, when I wake up in the middle of the night from some weird, fever dream and immediately feel the need to check my phone for god-knows-what information.
It’s a perfectly logical approach, and yet it’s such a deeply ingrained habit that I feel the need to hold myself accountable in front of tens of thousands of you fine Civil supporters. Thanks for hearing me out on this especially random musing, and here’s to a happier, healthier 2019 for all of us!
— Matt Coolidge
