“Writing the City” to Continue with Pledge from Columbia Journalism School

Places Editors

November 29, 2023

Images from the series "Writing the City"
Clockwise from top left: Sam Bloch; Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, a public high school in Westlake, Central Los Angeles. [Monica Nouwens for Places Journal]; Cheree Franco; Lincoln Beach in 2019. [Cheree Franco]

“Writing the City,” our ongoing collaboration with Columbia Journalism School, is poised to continue for another four rounds, thanks to a generous pledge of $40,000 from the school.

Launched in 2017, “Writing the City” offers alumni/ae of the Master of Arts program at the Columbia Journalism School the opportunity to write an ambitious work of urban journalism. Until now, the project had been supported by grants from the Cravens Foundation and from Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

That the Columbia Journalism School has now pledged new support — specifically, $10,000 each for the next four installments — is a testament to the value of this collaborative project and to the deeply researched and rigorous reportage it is producing.

‘We are thrilled to have support from Dean Jelani Cobb to continue our indispensable partnership with Places.’

“We are thrilled and grateful to have support from Dean Jelani Cobb at Columbia Journalism School to continue our indispensable partnership with Places,” Alisa Solomon, co-director, with David Hajdu, of the school’s Arts and Culture program, shared with us. “‘Writing the City’ advances exactly the values we cultivate in our program: in-depth reporting and graceful, analytical writing that places contemporary issues in historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts. We can’t wait to see the next probing ideas and compelling narratives our alumni/ae propose and bring to fruition through this collaboration.”

“Writing the City” has already produced exceptional works of longform journalism on important topics that might otherwise receive scant attention. In 2019, Sam Bloch wrote “Shade,” a pioneering analysis of shade as a public resource and critical consideration in urban planning. The second article in the series was published earlier this year; in “The City’s Beach, Run by the People,” Cheree Franco chronicled decades of government neglect of a Black public beach in New Orleans.

A request for proposals for the next round of “Writing the City” is open now through January 31, 2024, to all alumni/ae of the M.A. program of Columbia Journalism School.