By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag: Milton Valencia

A new Globe vertical will explore the racial wealth gap

Earlier today The Boston Globe unveiled Money, Power, Inequality, a new vertical dedicated to reporting on the racial wealth gap. It’s got its own section on the paper’s website as well as its own editor-in-chief, Kris Hooks, previously an assistant metro editor who worked at the NPR affiliate in Sacramento, California, before coming to the Globe. He also teaches a course on Race & Gender in the Media at Sacramento City College. Hooks writes:

The Globe has launched a new team that will zero in on the racial wealth gap, why it persists, and what can be done to close it. The team, called Money, Power, Inequality, will explore the city’s history of inequities, probing Boston’s role in the slave trade and tracing the systems that have perpetuated the racial wealth gap since. And we’ll look beyond Boston, to communities where prices are lower, but power imbalances still flourish.

Longtime Globe journalist Milton Valencia will serve as deputy editor. The initiative, announced last January, is being supported with a $750,000 grant from the Barr Foundation.

Money, Power, Inequality comes on the heels of “Nightmare in Mission Hill,” a text-based series, podcast and documentary film that attempts to deal with the racist legacy left behind by the 1989 Carol and Charles Stuart case, in which Charles Stuart murdered his wife and blamed it on a Black man, turning the city upside-down for months.

It also follows the end of the Globe’s involvement in The Emancipator, a collaboration with Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. Unlike The Emancipator, whose Globe half was based in the paper’s opinion section, Money, Power, Inequality will be part of the news operation — and will be entirely under the control of the Globe.

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Justice and the immigration system

The Marty Baron era is ending with a bang. As you no doubt already know, the Boston Globe this week published an exhaustive three-part series on the justice system and illegal immigration.

Called “Justice in the Shadows,” the series — reported by Maria Sacchetti and Milton Valencia — looks at illegal immigrants who have been released and committed serious crimes (including murder) because their home countries don’t want them back; at others who themselves have been treated unfairly, such a Lynn woman who died in custody; and, today, at the separate court system that has been set up inside prison walls.

The series is accompanied by videos and links to relevant legal documents. And there could be more to come: the Globe has sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to obtain “the names of thousands of criminal immigrants it released in the United States over the past four years, sometimes with tragic results.”

It’s also yet another reminder that important public-service journalism like this simply can’t be done without large, well-funded news organizations.

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