For Immediate Release: Announcing the Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting 2018-19 Fellows

June 5, 2018

CONTACT:

Jessica Stites

Jessica@inthesetimes.com

For Immediate Release: Announcing the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting’s 2018-2019 Fellows

Eli Day, David Dayen, and Valerie Vande Panne have been selected as the inaugural Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting Fellows.

As newsroom budgets shrink and media ownership becomes increasingly consolidated, it is more and more difficult for journalists to support themselves through reporting—especially those journalists pursuing stories that serve the public interest, not corporate interests. The Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting was established in recognition of this and of the tremendous amount of time and labor that goes into investigative reporting.

"This fellowship is designed to provide ample support for the types of investigations that corporate-owned media will not embrace—investigations that expose the stranglehold of corporations on our government and our lives, and investigations that lift up the radical alternatives being explored around the country,” says Institute founder Leonard C. Goodman.

Our three inaugural fellows were selected from an extremely competitive pool of more than 50 applicants for their ambitious proposals to illuminate the roots of economic injustice, expose corporate capture of government and document people’s everyday fights against systemic inequality.

• Eli Day is a recent Mother Jones editorial fellow who will be reporting for In These Times on the rise of black anti-capitalist movements in places like Jackson, Miss. “I spent my childhood crisscrossing Detroit’s ghettos, often along the edges of some of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs,” Day writes. “I’d wander those borders, trying to make sense of how squalor could sit so casually at the gates of opulence. The world wasn’t an accident, I’d learn, but rather the shadow cast by policy—of decisions made by people with power. That reckoning led me to journalism.”
• David Dayen is a Los Angeles-based finance, labor and economics reporter who authored Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. For In These Times, he will be afflicting the powerful and empowering the afflicted by investigating the ways in which Big Tech and Big Finance control and squeeze nearly every aspect of our work and lives.
• Valerie Vande Panne is an award-winning freelance reporter and the former editor-in-chief of Detroit’s alt-weekly, the Metro Times. “I grew up in working-class, rural Michigan,” Vande Panne writes. “I dropped out of high school. I spent most of my life in New York City. One of my gifts is that I am able to bridge cultural gaps, and translate perspectives in ways that enable deeper and more meaningful understandings of our shared world.” She will be traveling the country for In These Times, documenting how Americans in extreme poverty survive and thrive.

Over the next 12 months, their work will appear on InTheseTimes.com and in the pages of In These Times, a monthly print magazine with more than 50,000 subscribers, founded in 1976 by author and historian James Weinstein with the mission to "identify and clarify the struggles against corporate power now multiplying in American society."

The Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting, housed at In These Times magazine, is dedicated to pursuing in-depth investigative projects that advance democracy and economic justice, amplify the work of social justice movements, and hold government and corporations accountable. Through the Institute for Investigating Reporting, In These Times makes good on its founding belief that a crusading press and an informed public can create change.

For more information or to schedule an interview with one of the fellows, please contact Jessica Stites at Jessica@inthesetimes.com.

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