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Building a Better Beat:
Fall 2025 Cohort

Are you an early-career journalist in the South working to inform your community about safety—what threatens it, how it can be protected, and what truly keeps people safe?

Public safety coverage can sometimes be too narrowly framed around crime and the criminal legal system. But threats to safety take many forms—housing insecurity, wage theft, environmental pollution, and lack of access to healthcare, just to name a few. And communities across the country are experimenting with creative solutions to these and other safety issues they’re facing. Journalists have the opportunity to expand their lens to include these long-overlooked problems and solutions. 

The Center for Just Journalism’s Building a Better Beat Cohort is a 4-month virtual training program designed to help Southern journalists expand their understanding of public safety and strengthen their reporting on the systems that shape it.

What You’ll Get:

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    • Twice-monthly virtual gatherings, featuring trainings, discussions, and time for peer connection, from August through November 2025 

    • Workshops with experienced reporters and editors on how to cover public safety beyond the crime beat

    • Opportunities to workshop and refine story ideas with a community of journalists tackling similar challenges

    •  Hands-on support for investigating public safety issues like wage theft, building code violations, chemical emissions, and other issues that affect people’s wellbeing but often go unreported

    • Space to sharpen your analysis by connecting individual incidents to broader systems, patterns, and root causes

    • A network of Southern journalists committed to building a more accurate and nuanced public safety beat

Why This Matters

Crime data only captures a sliver of the physical and economic threats people face. But because police departments often serve as a pipeline of information to the news media, stories about the crimes that police track–like shootings, burglaries, and shoplifting– are overrepresented, while safety issues like wage theft, housing discrimination, price fixing, and illegal chemical emissions rarely show up in the news. Similarly, the criminal legal system generates a lot of media coverage, but community-based policies and programs designed to reduce violence and other types of harm are less prominently featured.

This cohort is a place to challenge those patterns. Together, we’ll explore what public safety journalism can look like when it centers community experiences and asks deeper questions about causes and solutions.

 

Who Should Apply

This program is for early-career journalists based in the South who are committed to improving public safety coverage and want to be in conversation with others doing the same. We welcome participants from local, regional, and national outlets, as well as freelancers. Apply here.