Civil Weekly Newsletter: 2/1/2019 Edition

Colorado beef; Japanese media; Hydroelectric energy. Here’s what Civil Newsrooms covered this week.

Thanks to everyone who donated to Popula’s Kickstarter campaign. The culture magazine surpassed their fundraising goal, raising nearly $30,000 to fund independent journalism.

Here’s what Civil Newsrooms did this week:

• Chicago has been suffering its lowest temperature in 30 years. So when one resident saw that local inmates were being tasked to shovel snow in the frigid cold, he took a photo that has outraged residents. Read what happened in Block Club Chicago — including how the sheriff’s department has denied any injustice took place.
• Listen to this week’s FAQ NYC to hear from Documented’s Mazin Sidahmed and Felipe de la Hoz about how New York feds are making arrests inside federal courthouses — and what this could mean for the future of immigration in the United States.
• Meanwhile, Documented published a more detailed, written account on this topic, in which they add more details that include excerpts from the reports filed by New York Court Officers.
• Cannabis Wire follows the historic decision in Israel to allow medical cannabis exports. And this could unlock many changes to the industry — including over $250 million in taxes for the country.
• What’s the beef deal? Colorado’s agricultural exports have quadrupled over the past 20 years, including the beef that is traveling across the world to South Korea. The Colorado Sun explains.
• “Florianópolis? Is that in Greece?” In this Popula piece, the author explains what it means to be from an island in southern Brazil — including the region’s myths, folklore, riots and beaches.
• In this week’s ZigZag episode, producer Thalia Beaty travels to Massena, New York to talk about innovation, crypto, hydroelectric energy, jobs, money and the future. It’s an episode you have to listen to to believe.
• One media startup in Tokyo is building a publishing platform that displays more than 50,000 articles from hundreds of publishers. Splice explains why this is significant — and how it could bring unity and change to the Japanese media environment.
• Harith “Snoop” Augustus was shot and killed on July 18, 2018 by Chicago police. While his death seems to have been forgotten by some, one man is struggling to deal with the circumstances surrounding his death. GroundTruth Project explains the historical significance and injustice of this man’s story.
• Yesterday was the last day of January — which means that some publications, like Hmm Daily, ran out of their monthly Associated Press image allotment. To use them up, the publication’s creative director shows us images that have to do with the word BOWL. Enjoy.
• In The Small Bow’s second Inverse Pitching Assignment, readers submitted the songs from their non-sober years that have haunted them in their sober ones.
• Sludge finds that members of the U.S. House committee that oversees environmental protections and fossil fuel companies have personally invested millions of dollars in the fossil fuel industry. The politicians’ investment ranges in this industry vs. their 2017 incomes may shock you.

Civil en español

• Después del tornado en La Habana, las víctimas dicen, “aquí no viene nadie.” 14ymedio informe sobre las condiciones en las que sobreviven los damnificados.

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

We’ll be sharing some exciting news in this space over the coming weeks: Civil’s launch is just around the corner! We’ve spent the past few weeks putting the finishing touches on Civil’s core product suite — here’s a quick refresher of what members of the Civil community can expect on day one:

• the Civil Registry, where new newsrooms will appear, and where our community will be able to have transparent discussions with the journalists behind Civil newsrooms
• the Civil Publisher, the plug-in which allows news organizations to access Civil’s publishing software, and to permanently archive content on the blockchain. Almost all of the existing Civil Newsrooms have successfully done this in recent weeks, with the remaining newsrooms doing so over the next two.

In addition, we’ll be rolling out a new-and-improved experience for purchasing Civil tokens, which will power transactions within the Civil network. It’s an exciting time for all of us — and what we believe will be the beginning of a more hopeful future for journalism.

— Matt Coolidge