Through a partnership with the NCDJ and the Ford Foundation, The New York Times is accepting applications for a reporting fellow who will explore what it means to live with a disability in America.
The fellow will work for a year on the Times’ National desk, focusing on reporting that illuminates and explains issues facing people living with disabilities. The fellow also will take some general assignment breaking news shifts and will receive coaching from the NCDJ and mentoring by a Times journalist with expertise on the topic.
The National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University is partnering with The New York Times to create a new fellowship program to enhance coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities.
The program, to launch later this year, will place an early-career journalist in The Times newsroom each year for the next two years to develop expertise and report on a range of disability issues. It is set to be funded by philanthropy.
The fellow will be part of a larger fellowship cohort at The Times and will receive mentoring from both a Times’ staff member with expertise in covering disabilities and the NCDJ, which provides support and advice to journalists around the world who cover such issues. The NCDJ also will provide training to the Times’ newsroom.
Nearly one in five people in the United States lives with a disability, but these issues are undercovered, said Ted Kim, director of Early Career Journalism Strategy and Recruiting for The New York Times. “Few avenues exist to develop journalistic expertise on disability issues because such beats do not exist at most news outlets,” he said. “The lack of coverage, in turn, results in a lack of awareness about issues that affect a large portion of the country.”
Kristin Gilger, interim dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU and director of the NCDJ, echoed the need for more and better coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities. “This fellowship program is an important step in the right direction at one of the nation’s top media institutions,” she said.
The application is now open for the first fellow, who will join The Times in June. Preference will be given to promising early-career journalists who also have experience living with a disability or who have developed a deep understanding of disability through the experiences of a family member or loved one. The deadline to submit an application is 5 p.m., New York Time, on March 31, 2021. Applicants are advised to submit well before the deadline.
The fellows will be part of The New York Times Fellowship program , a talent pipeline initiative started in 2019 to seed and diversify the next generation of journalists in local newsrooms across America. It trains journalists in reporting, audio, visual and other disciplines.
The National Center on Disability and Journalism is a service of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. For the past 12 years at Cronkite, the center has provided support and training for journalists and other communications professionals with the goal of improving media coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities.
For many people who are deaf or hard of hearing, lip reading, facial expressions and body language are vital to communication, but protective face masks and remote work and school meant to slow the spread of COVID-19 have made it more difficult.
More than 1.1 million people in Arizona are hard of hearing, and more than 20,000 are deaf, according to the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
NCDJ Director Kristin Gilger discusses job description language in a recently published HuffPost article by Wendy Lu. The image shown above is a screenshot of Wendy Lu’s HuffPost piece with the headline “This Is How Employers Weed Out Disabled People From Their Hiring Pools.”
Job listings that discourage people with disabilities from applying are prevalent across professional industries, from journalism and news media to finance and higher education. Not only do these job descriptions discourage candidates with disabilities from applying to jobs for which they are qualified, but they also exacerbate the larger problem of people with disabilities being underemployed in full-time work.
Kristin Gilger, a senior associate dean at the Cronkite School and our director here at the NCDJ, is quoted in a recent HuffPost article discussing why these job descriptions are problematic and how they can be changed to attract a more diverse pool of candidates. The article was written by Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate.
Click here to read Lu’s article on disability discrimination in the workplace.
Lisa Iezzoni graduated from medical school but didn’t end up becoming a practicing doctor. This was before the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, and she says she just didn’t have the support. Read her story in Doctors With Disabilities Push For Culture Change In Medicine, produced in collaboration with WHYY’s The Pulse, NPR and Kaiser Health News.
Lisa Iezzoni is professor of medicine at Harvard. She has multiple sclerosis and researches disparities in health care for people with disabilities. Elana Gordon/WHYY
Former U.S. Treasury economist Ernie Tedeschi wrote a guest column for the New York Times analyzing recent labor force employment data. Tedeschi sourced his information from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and discovered promising signs that people with disabilities are returning to the labor force. Check out Tedeschi’s full report in NYT and readers’ comments about why the trend is occurring.
Unemployment rates for people with disabilities are significantly higher across America–especially in West Virginia, where around 25 percent of disabled people are employed. Some states are working to reduce those numbers, following a South Dakota state agency’s example. Read more
A photographer from North Wales is using their work to change the world’s perspective on disability. The unique photos show people with disabilities sharing something about their own dreams or ambitions. Read more
Pennsylvania is considering a plan that would reduce sheltered workshop jobs, advocating for more community inclusion for adults with disabilities. Read more
