In October, The Occidental and Boulevard Sentinel announced the NELA Neighborhood Reporting Partnership (NELA NRP) — a professional collaboration between the two newsrooms to better serve the communities of NELA while offering our reporters valuable local experience. After months of planning and hours in interviews, we are beyond excited to introduce our student journalists who will work this semester to provide essential, bilingual local news coverage to the residents of Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Cypress Park, Mt. Washington and Elysian Valley.
The mission of this 13-member inaugural cohort is to serve the residents of NELA with quality, relevant and actionable information and local news to enrich their daily lives and support them during the dueling crises we currently face. Our reporters will cultivate beats covering COVID-19, education, transportation, business and workers, social issues and social justice and local politics.
NELA NRP founding editor Matthew Reagan (senior) will be joined by new section editor Indie Lau (junior) to oversee seven NELA Neighborhood Reporters as Community News editors. Former News editor Zach Goodwin (senior) also joins the partnership as the coordinator of The Occidental’s new four-person Spanish translation team.
We believe we have assembled a team well equipped to serve the communities of NELA and are excited to build upon the community reporting we have done thus far. This week, we copublished a story of vaccine education with the Boulevard Sentinel and published coverage of local unionization efforts and the LA River Master Plan. These stories build on the coverage of local mail operations, COVID-19 and Scholl Canyon that we copublished in the Fall.
We are excited to get to work and are hopeful that this will be the first of many semesters for NELA NRP.
Have a tip? You can submit a tip to our Community News editors here. Follow our coverage on Twitter @NELA_NRP
