Assignments & Commissions

NBC News: “The Flooding of Everson, Washington

Writer: Evan Bush
Photo Editor: Zara Katz

Cristina Martinez for The New York Times: “Seeing Ourselves in Bloom” 

“Like many other artists, Ms. Martinez has met the coronavirus pandemic and waves of social unrest this year as best she knows how: by taking all the vulnerability the moment has exposed and putting it on canvas. And she has a very specific goal: to illuminate the experience of hyphenated American womanhood.” 

Story: Sandra E. Garcia
Photo Editor: Eve Lyons 

The Guardian US: “Nuclear waste ravaged their land. The Yakama Nation is on a quest to rescue it” 

Writer: Hallie Golden
Photo Editor: Gail Fletcher

High Country News: Why the country’s largest shellfish farm is struggling to hire and retain workers

Writer: Mara Kardas-Nelson
Photo Editor: Luna Anna Archey

The New Yorker: “The Aging Student Debtors of America” 

“Karin Engstrom, an eighty-one-year-old retired career counsellor, who returned to school after getting a divorce, owes a hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars in student loans.”

Writer: Eleni Schirmer
Photo Editor: Bowen Fernie 

The Wall Street Journal: “The Pandemic Didn’t Unfold How Dr. Christine Hancock Expected

“One doctor finds her non-Covid patients—with chronic diseases, addiction and mental illness—have suffered the most in an overwhelmed healthcare system.”

Writer: Anna Wilde Mathews 
Photo Editor: Allison Pasek

The New York Times: “First Covid, Then Psychosis: ‘The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Experienced’

“Like a small number of Covid survivors with no previous mental illness, Ivan Agerton developed psychotic symptoms weeks after his coronavirus infection.”

Writer: Pam Belluck
Photo Editor: Matt McCann 

TIME: “How Communities of Color Have Found Strength, Joy and Comfort in a Year Like No Other” 

“NorthStar Cycling Club takes its name not just from the sky, but also from history—the star Harriet Tubman used as a guide to free enslaved Americans. “When we get on our bikes, it is an element of freedom,” says founding member Edwin Lindo, who launched the cycling club based in Seattle in February 2020, just before the pandemic started. He and co-founder Aaron Bossett wanted to encourage more BIPOC individuals to take up cycling.”

Writers: Cady Lang and Kat Moon
Photo Editor: Kara Milstein

The Wall Street Journal: “Lessons From Remote School, Captured by Twin Sisters Who Pulled Through

“Rachael and Hailey Gough were thriving until lockdown hit their high school. Then they struggled to get out of bed, let alone stay on a path to college.”

Writer: Yoree Koh
Photo Editor: Parker Eshelman

The Wall Street Journal: “He Convinced the Elite He Invested for Good. Then the Money Vanished.

“Andrew Farnum, then a Gates Foundation official, raised questions in 2017 about Abraaj’s handling of investments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Writers: Simon Clark and Will Louch
Photo Editor: Maïa Booker

The Lily/Washington Post: “Women in the craft beer industry say they’re treated like they don’t belong. Now, they’re speaking up.

“Despite women being at the helm of beer brewing for hundreds of years, many in the industry say it’s full of gatekeeping.”

Writers: Emily Bloch
Photo Editor: Haley Hamblin 

The Washington Post: “In a summer of smoke, a small town wonders: ‘How are we going to do better than survive?’

“For much of the past month, Winthrop and its neighbors up and down the Methow Valley in Washington state have lived under an oppressive blanket of wildfire smoke. On certain days air quality has been the worst in the country — and possibly in the world — according to the National Weather Service, which described it as ‘almost off-the-charts hazardous.’”

Writers: Joshua Partlow
Photo Editor: Olivier Laurent

Crosscut: “A Skagit Valley attack brings WA hate crime laws into question

“Months after a brutal attack on a Mexican American teenager about an hour north of Seattle, Latino advocates are demanding the assault be charged as a hate crime.”

Writers: Lilly Fowler 
Photo Editor: Shaminder Dulai

The New York Times: “From 2 Artists, 2 Ways to Tell Stories of Black America

Writer: Ted Loos
Photo Editor: Eve Lyons

TIME: “Society Is Paying the Price for America's Outdated Police Training Methods”

“No one is regulating police training on a national level. There are no federal minimum requirements for the amount of time cadets spend training to become police officers or for what they must study, and no national system for licensing officers. Though Rhode Island requires 22 weeks of basic law-enforcement training, Georgia requires a minimum of 11— while a barber needs 1,500 hours of training, or more than 37 workweeks, to even qualify to take the licensing exam in the same state. Hawaii has no training standards or minimum qualifications for police officers. Many states allow 18-year-olds to become police officers. Most do not require implicit-bias or de-escalation training. In some states, it’s possible to join a police department and go out on patrol, armed with a gun and a badge, before finishing at a police academy or even enrolling in one.”

Writer: Alana Semuels 
Photo Editor: Kara Milstein


The Washington Post: “How the Swinomish Tribe has Pioneered the Fight Against Climate Change” 

“After a brutal storm in 2006, the Swinomish tribe off the coast of Washington state launched a strategy to deal with the effects of a warming planet. Now, 50 other native tribes have followed suit.”

Writer: Jim Morrison
Photo Editor: Olivier Laurent

Katherine Hansen for The New York Times: “Many Who Recovered Still Haven’t Regained Their Sense of Smell”

Writer: Roni Caryn Rabin
Photo Editor: Matt McCann 

The Washington Post: “24 hours in the life of American workers

Photographed 22-year-old Aushenae Matthews, who manages a shelter for domestic violence survivors in South King County, Washington. 

Writer: Kristen Millares Young
Photo Editor: Nick Kirkpatrick


The New York Times Magazine: “The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks” 

“In March, when the United States began to lock down to slow the spread of the new virus, some workers noticed a change in how the government talked about them. As leaders planned for closures, it became clear that many of the lowest-paid and least-respected jobs in America were, in fact, the most important: the ones that could not be paused or interrupted or bypassed if society was to keep functioning. You could not, as Knutson put it, simply close the door to a farm for a month and then reopen it. People who had regularly been called illegal suddenly found themselves rebranded as essential.”

In “The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks,” reporter Brooke Jarvis writes about how the pandemic has exposed the problems within our food system. Read more or listen to the piece at nytimes.com.

Writer: Brooke Jarvis
Photo Editor: Kristen Geisler


Sara-Jayne Terp for WIRED: “One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation”

“Sara-Jayne Terp uses the tools of cybersecurity to track false claims like they’re malware. Her goal: Stop dangerous lies from hacking our beliefs.”

Writer: Sonner Kehrt 
Photo Editor: Lauren Joseph







The California Sunday Magazine: “What Happened in Room 10?”

“From their beds, Helen and Twilla could hear nurses running down the hallway. The sound was conspicuous because people don’t usually run inside nursing homes.”

Reporter Katie Engelhart investigates the history of America’s nursing homes and the impact of COVID at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, WA — the site of the country’s first nursing home outbreak. 

Writer: Katie Englehart
Photo Editors: Paloma Shutes, Jacqueline Bates


STAT News: “A reckoning for health care professionals: Should they be activists, too?

Coverage of the “Healthcare Workers for Justice March” in Seattle, for a STAT News piece by Ruth Hailu. 

“‘The idea, I think mistakenly so, was that there isn’t bias that exists in medicine. It’s a neutral playing field,’ said Estell Williams, a surgeon at the University of Washington and one of the organizers of the march in Seattle. ‘People are just now understanding or coming to terms with the fact that, you know, that isn’t the case.’”

Writer: Ruth Hailu
Photo Editor: Crystal Milner 


The Marshall Project: “This City Stopped Sending Police to Every 911 Call” 

“In Olympia, Washington, unarmed ‘crisis responders,’ wearing no uniforms, are being dispatched by 911 to de-escalate some conflicts and connect people with services.”

Writer: Christie Thompson 
Photo Editor: Celina Fang


The Wall Street Journal

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