Tag: Canada

April Alonso of Cicero Independiente tells us how a bilingual news project serves its community

April Alonso. Photo by Michael Izquierdo.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with April Alonso, co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago. The nonprofit bilingual news outlet covers the communities of Cicero and Berwyn in Illinois.

Cicero Independiente and MuckRock, a Boston-based investigative news organization that specializes in public records and investigative reporting, won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, given by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, for an investigation of air quality called “The Air We Breathe.”

April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. She was a multimedia fellow for The Chicago Reporter, and served as a multimedia content creator for “La Verdad,” a bilingual podcast.

I’ve got a Quick Take about a town north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, that has learned a bitter lesson about Canada’s law forcing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to pay for news. The law has led to a rise in disinformation with fewer effective ways to combat it. Meta’s greed is at the heart of this, of course. But so, too, is the failure of government officials to realize that their proposed solution to help local news outlets would backfire in an ugly way.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a new philanthropic effort created by The Minnesota Star Tribune. It’s called the Local News Fund, and it is soliciting donations supporting statewide journalism that will be matched by a $500,000 grant from a Minnesota foundation.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Richard Ford’s taut, brilliant anti-mystery

Normally I don’t get much of a chance to read fiction. Even a book that’s not about the media is a luxury.

Earlier this summer, though, I read Richard Ford’s latest novel, “Canada,” and recommend it highly. I had read and admired two of his earlier works — “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” the latter of which won a Pulitzer Prize. So when the New York Times Book Review gave “Canada” a rave (by Andre Dubus III, no less), I decided to dive in.

“Canada” is divided into two parts — before and after, if you will. The first part is as brilliant and perfect a piece of writing as I’ve read in a long time. Ford plays with and blows apart the notion of suspense with his first two sentences:

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

All of part one is given over to Ford’s telling us a little bit more, then a little more, then a little more. Everything is foreshadowed. There are no surprises. And it is brilliant.

Part two, in which the murders take place, is just slightly uneven, at least in comparison to the taut, seamless quality of part one. But without part two, Ford wouldn’t have had a story. And at its best, it is very good indeed.