Next City is partnering with The Jersey Bee, a public service news organization working with communities in Essex County and New Jersey, to launch a series exploring segregation across the Newark metropolitan area and the former “slave state of the North.”
Through 2024, our nonprofit newsrooms will collaboratively report on the persistent legacy of segregation in housing, healthcare and other systems in the country’s most heavily segregated metropolitan area – and what it takes to reimagine Essex County and New Jersey as equitable and just places.
Kimberly Izar, who holds an M.A. in Engagement Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, will lead the series as Next City’s newest Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow. The series is kicking off today with Izar’s report on the region’s history of segregation and how it manifests today.
READ: In Essex County, New Jersey’s history of segregation persists
“I’m thrilled to join Next City to lift up solutions that center the expertise of working-class, BIPOC communities in New Jersey,” says Izar, a New Jersey native. “Journalism works best when everyone can participate in the process. I look forward to collaborating with communities on coverage that deeply matters to them.”
She has experience covering a range of issues, including food access, public housing, labor, and Asian American arts and culture. Her work has been featured in NPR, Gothamist, Prism, WBAI and others. Previously, Kim was a movement fundraiser for nearly a decade supporting democracy and economic development efforts.
The Jersey Bee is led by Simon Galperin, an award-winning journalist and 2022 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Galperin launched the organization in 2020 to serve the local news and information needs of the area’s BIPOC and working-class communities. “I’m thrilled our community engagement and collaborations can enable us to move the conversation on segregation and reparation forward in New Jersey.”
Last year, the newsroom participated in Segregated, a statewide collaboration of news organizations reporting on the topic. The Jersey Bee heard from dozens of Essex County residents who shared how segregation manifests in housing and schooling in New Jersey, from the lack of investment in majority-renter neighborhoods to racial segregation in elementary schools.
The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice has found that Black and Latinx households in Essex County are half as likely to own a home than white households and three times more likely to live in poverty than white residents. Black and Latinx people across the state are more likely to be uninsured than white residents, per the New Jersey Department of Health. And as The Bee has previously reported, police in the township of Bloomfield stop Black and Latino drivers at twice the rate of white drivers, facing allegations of acting as a “border patrol” reinforcing regional segregation.
“We’re proud to work with The Jersey Bee to produce solutions-oriented journalism that is truly responsive to local community needs,” says Next City’s managing editor Aysha Khan. “Their ongoing coverage and robust community engagement have laid a strong foundation for this series.”
Established in 2014, Next City’s Equitable Cities Fellowship offers journalists of color a six-month to one-year position to report on solutions that level the playing field for those who have long been denied equal opportunity because of power structures based on race, gender and sexual orientation.
Supported by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the fellowship is designed to bring underrepresented voices to the forefront of the conversation about cities and their future.
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