Never forget that 2020 was the year that Black, Indigenous and otherwise racialized journalists in Canada stopped whispering and said it all out loud. In the order that I remember:

Thread: When I started doing investigative journalism full time, I fully understood the responsibility I was taking on. In a sea of disinformation from all sides, I vowed to be a place people could come where they knew they were getting the truth, even if painful.

As time went on and I looked at the landscape around me, I widened my goal. How could I start a new company that was FILLED with people who had the same commitment to honest journalism that I did? With the help of some amazing people, @UncoverDC was born.

We have a set of standards at @UncoverDC that I am honored to say are much different than elsewhere. Straight news, with NO partisan spin, investigative journalism, and opinion. This is what we do at @UncoverDC and we do it really well.

Since we “opened” a year and a half ago we have had some amazing accomplishments. I shared some of them in this post: “One year of Actual Journalism”

We’ve come so far even since this article, and I think it’s because we value and respect all of you so much as our equal. UncoverDC is for everyone. You are all a part of this family. A lot of folks have told me that what I will say next has been to my detriment.

On an almost daily basis I see journalism about (never by) trans people repeating and spreading inaccurate information or responding to a partially imagined reality. It goes without saying that any discussion about trans rights needs to begin with facts!

People talk about trans people accessing spaces based on their gender identity as a big scary dangerous change coming down the tracks. Trans people *already* live their lives and access spaces on the basis of self-ID. No one produces a birth certificate to go to the loo!

It’s also the case that in the trickiest cases like domestic abuse refuges, there are exemptions in the Equality Act. (This looks like a piece about RLB but it’s a GRA/EA explainer!)

There have also been misunderstandings about new perinatal guidance at Brighton & Sussex hospital trust (ie the “chest-feeding” debate)

Phrases like "chest-feeding" are given in the guidance as an example of language that a trans man or non-binary person who is expecting a baby might prefer nurses to use. If you’re a new mum in these hospitals it is *explicit* that the language used to address you won’t change.

Some thoughts from yesterday. A thread:

I have spent 23 years at The @nytimes, seven of them covering Congress. I made my home at a desk in the press gallery off the Senate chamber. I felt privileged to do so. I consider the Capitol sacred space. 1/

I have been there for any number of historic moments. The funeral of Ronald Reagan, a few years after 9/11, when the building had to be cleared in a panic because the governor of Kentucky flew his plane too close to the Capitol and the police thought it was a terrorist attack. 2/

The confirmation of Supreme Court justices, including John Roberts, the chief. The swearing in of Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House. Twice. The impeachment of President Trump. I still have my own handwritten tally of the vote to acquit. I bore witness. 3/

I know that building inside and out. I know (or once knew) where the bathtubs in the basement are. They were put there in to the 1800s because senators didn’t have tubs in their own homes. The Senate historian once gave me a tour. 4/

I know where they keep the Lincoln catafalque – the funeral bier, or platform, that has held the casket of every person who has lain in state since Lincoln. It's housed behind a locked gate in a little alcove underneath the crypt, the circular room underneath the Rotunda. 5/

Who wants to know what it's like to go on the record with a reporter? Pull up a chair. I'll tell you.

I should clarify that I've done this a grand total of 1 time and with only one journalist. :-) I can speak to my experience and what helped.

"Going on the record" generally means you're taking some sort of risk. I knew this. I thought it over for a very long time. I hoped someone else would go on the record. I kept waiting for that person to show up. And one day I realized, hmmmm..... maybe I should be that person.

I knew of @bobsmietana because I had seen his work. He's passionate about religion reporting. He loves the "God beat". If you have a story to tell and it involves something related to a faith community, you want someone who understands that faith.

In addition, @bobsmietana lives in the Nashville area. (That's widely known now. Sorry, Bob). He understands Middle TN. It has a rare air of it's own when it comes to religion reporting.

@StefSimanowitz wrote about Eric in 2013. Here Eric speaks about standing up for journalist

Stefan Simanowitz on Twitter on 19.3.13...thread
In 2003, as Baghdad shuddered under the onslaught that was operation "shock and awe", 75yrold Eric Levy from Camden was huddled with a dozen other peace campaigners in an air raid shelter at Dura oil refinery in southern Baghdad./

The group found themselves in Iraq at the time of the Allied invasion after travelling there from London by double-decker bus. They called themselves the "human shields" and set off with the intention of protecting Iraqi civilians from Allied bombs.

If you're over 20, or were a precociously politically aware five-year-old in 2003, you might remember the human shields leaving for Iraq in a frenzy of media coverage. “The idea behind the movement was to use the racist way in which Western lives are valued /

more than Iraqi lives to either stop the invasion or – failing that – protect crucial civilian infrastructure sites,” Levy recalls ten years on. “We may not have achieved the first objective, but none of the sites where the shields were staying were bombed.”/