Next City is pleased to welcome back Marielle Argueza as our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Racial Justice Narratives.
She will join Next City, a nonprofit news organization covering solutions for equitable cities, for a four-month reporting fellowship in partnership with the local alt-weekly, Triad City Beat. Based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the fellowship will explore urban policy and justice in the NC Piedmont Triad, with a focus on its vast immigrant and refugee communities.
“I’m excited to write stories that shed light on how immigrant communities are contributing to the culture and infrastructure of the city,” Argueza says. “But I’m also interested in writing nuanced stories about how different waves of immigrant populations are seen, helped, or maybe even harmed by changing city policies and urban solutions.”
In 2022, Argueza worked with Next City as our INN/Columbia Journalism School intern, shortly after completing her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School, where she was a Toni Stabile Investigative Fellow. During her internship, she reported a number of stories on economic and housing justice, including coverage of the landback movement, reentry and accessory dwelling unit financing.
An award-winning journalist, she has more than a decade of experience reporting on education, immigration, labor, criminal justice, climate and more. Her work includes a story on Harlem’s last assisted-living facility for people living with HIV/AIDS; a profile on New York State’s first Farmers Union; and a database of deaths within the Milwaukee County Jail.
“Marielle’s dedication to community-based journalism and solutions-oriented reporting could not be more clear,” says Aysha Khan, Next City’s managing editor. “Working with Marielle during her previous internship was a dream, and we couldn’t be more excited to have her back on board as part of this local-national journalism collaboration.”
She is also a recipient of other fellowships and scholarships from several notable organizations within the news industry including the Asian American Journalists Association, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, ProPublica, and the Journalism and Women Symposium.
“Triad City Beat is so excited to have a dogged reporter like Marielle join the team,” says Sayaka Matsuoka, Triad City Beat’s managing editor. “Greensboro has a diverse immigrant and refugee population and is a city that is, in many ways, trying to lead the way in what an equitable city can look like for its inhabitants. I’m excited to see the kinds of stories we can produce that accurately reflect our city and ask questions of how we can do things better.”
Triad City Beat is a biweekly publication that was founded in 2014 and exists to chronicle the Triad cities as low-cost incubators of innovation, sustainability and creativity. It provides lively and vital coverage of food, music and the arts in Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point.
Founded in 2003, Next City’s journalism centers marginalized voices while amplifying solutions to the problems that oppress people in cities. Next City’s readers are the city-builders who share our vision for the transformation of cities. Our core audience consists of individuals working in city planning, finance, architecture, media, academia, transportation, the arts — or within any sector that must collaborate to make cities run more equitably.
Established in 2014, Next City’s Equitable Cities Fellowship offers journalists of color the opportunity 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. People of color, although representative of more than half the population of the 10 largest U.S. cities, are vastly underrepresented in the media and in many conversations about urban trends and growth.
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