Shadowproof’s Seventh Birthday: Wanting Again On One other 12 months

Politics

Shadowproof’s Seventh Birthday: Wanting Again On One other 12 months

Editorial Board

August 2, 2022

Shadowproof’s Seventh Birthday: Wanting Again On One other 12 months

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Shadowproof was launched seven years in the past. With many crises dealing with our world, we’re proud to nonetheless be publishing unbiased journalism.

Since our final birthday, Shadowproof has revealed a number of articles from freelance journalists at our web site and as a part of The Dissenter, our publication centered on whistleblower tales and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case.

Thanks partially to the Marvel Cooke Fellowship, we had been in a position to pay writers greater quantities than in earlier years. This was made attainable by members and donors, who’ve stepped as much as give cash in a precarious time, and by journalists, who contributed work and believed we might present them with a strong platform.

Our members and donors have kind of caught by us regardless of the waves of financial despair and instability sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the US-Russia proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola continued his protection of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case and reported on an enchantment listening to in the UK in October 2021. He put out studies when the UK Supreme Court docket refused to listen to Assange’s enchantment, when the UK judiciary permitted america authorities’s extradition request, and when House Workplace Secretary Priti Patel gave extradition her stamp of approval.

Whereas sustaining The Dissenter E-newsletter, Kevin wrote his e book, Responsible of Journalism: The Political Case Towards Julian Assange, which is scheduled for launch from Censored Press and Seven Tales Press in February 2023. It’s a thorough evaluation of the US authorities’s case towards Assange and the implications for press freedom that may function a information if and when Assange is dropped at the US for trial.

Past Prisons, which Shadowproof publishing editor Brian Nam-Sonenstein co-hosts, entered its fifth 12 months of publication. The present is presently exploring community-based violence interventions, such because the Inventive Interventions Toolkit [PDF].

Shadowproof proudly continued the Marvel Cooke journalism fellowship, which Brian organizes. In 2021, we revealed eight articles together with contributions from two incarcerated reporters at California’s San Quentin jail: Juan Moreno Haines and Rahsaan Thomas.

This 12 months, with the continued beneficiant monetary backing of Mariame Kaba and extra donations from our readers, we had been in a position to provide bigger fellowships at $2000 every. We’re working with a bigger group of incarcerated journalists and artists than we did in 2021.

We simply revealed our first fellowship piece of the second spherical by Vanessa Taylor on how abolitionist organizers see counterterrorism as a response to white supremacy.

The venture sadly has confronted quite a few setbacks and delays because of repression, outbreaks of COVID and different infectious sicknesses, and mail censorship in prisons. Although we could should delay publication for work from incarcerated fellows, we stay affected person and chronic in our dedication to work via it and help them as finest we are able to in our collaboration.

C.J. Baker, who curates a web site known as “Ongoing Historical past Of Protest Songs,” stored up his bi-weekly posts that includes the most recent protest songs.

What we do is feasible due to Shadowproof members and donors. The extra recurring month-to-month contributions we obtain, the extra unbiased journalism we are able to produce. It helps us pay journalists extra, and we’re in a position to broaden our work.

We invite readers to turn out to be Shadowproof members by donating right here. If you want one thing in return to your generosity, you possibly can subscribe to The Dissenter E-newsletter. (To rejoice, we now have a birthday particular that may let you take $15 off a 12 months subscription.)

Tens of hundreds of media jobs had been misplaced because the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. The influence of the previous two years on freelance journalists is incalculable—primarily as a result of layoffs introduced by information organizations sometimes don’t embody contractors or freelancers.

At Shadowproof, we do our greatest to push again towards a media tradition that devalues freelance journalists. Each freelance journalist who involves us with a pitch for a narrative units the quantity that they want to be paid, after which we negotiate from there. We don’t take per week, a month, or longer to pay journalists for his or her work. Our commonplace is to pay them the day that their work seems on our website.

Many websites are confined to their internet handle, however we’re utilizing Shadowproof as a base of operations that may help the event and distribution of a publication, podcasts, and this 12 months, we’re growing the variety of livestreams and content material we publish to the Shadowproof YouTube channel.

Each greenback we increase will increase the probabilities for what we are able to do with Shadowproof.

It won’t be lengthy earlier than we’re within the throes of one other presidential election cycle. But Shadowproof will stay principled and follow our protection of points and actions which might be preventing for environmental, financial, racial, and social justice. We’ll keep centered on struggles, just like the grassroots campaigns to defund the police, abolish the jail industrial-complex, and decriminalize abortion.

If the overturning of Roe taught us something, it’s how Democrats completely failed us. They promised for not less than the final 15 years that if we voted for them they might defend girls from shedding their proper to reproductive well being care. However once they had the facility to codify that proper into regulation beneath President Barack Obama, they did nothing.

President Donald Trump energized right-wing forces in america. Trump’s bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat Trump in 2020, and Democrats gained management of the White Home and Congress. But after as soon as once more demanding that susceptible communities vote for them in the event that they wished to be protected, Democrats let a cold-blooded minority rule.

Biden and the Democrats did little-to-nothing to guard residents’ rights and reply to the Republican onslaught. That teaches us to have restricted religion in electoralism. What has extra probability of delivering positive aspects for folks in dire want is direct and open confrontation with these in energy. Actions that make calls for, block authorities operations, and wage public demonstrations and refuse to go residence when instructed to disperse usually tend to beat again creeping fascism.

We’ve got us, and the connections we forge, and solely we are able to save us from the existential threats barreling down upon our communities—local weather disaster, wars for empire, pandemics, drought, famine, nuclear holocaust, and so on.

Thanks once more for believing in what we do at Shadowproof.

Right here’s to a different 12 months of unbiased journalism.

Kevin Gosztola, Managing Editor
Brian Nam-Sonenstein, Publishing Editor