Hillman Foundation

The Best of the Week’s News: 

• How Trump is botching the response to the coronavirus epidemic. 
   
• Union nurses say their hospitals are unprepared to defend against coronavirus. 
   
• Public defenders accuse the NYPD of manufacturing a paper “crime wave” to smear bail reform. 
   
• New docs show $157,000 in secret payments from the Secret Service to Trump properties.
   
• A federal judge demands to check Bill Barr’s work because he can’t trust the AG to apply FOIA honestly on the Mueller report. 

The Sidney Hillman Foundation is very proud to announce that Jaime Longoria, a fourth-semester student from the Newmark J-School Class of 2019, is the winner of our 2020 Social Justice Reporting Award.

Jaime grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and graduated from Boston University in 2015 with a B.A. in international relations.

In 2016, he began working as an intern at the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute (since renamed Type), a position he soon leveraged into a full-time role as a data and web editor. Jaime first came to the Newmark J-School in 2017 as a participant in the Knight Diversity program, during which he was assigned to the Mott Haven Herald and Hunts Point Express for his summer internship.

After enrolling at the J-School in the fall of 2018, Jaime was selected for the NBC Media Leadership Program and has since been offered a full-time position at NBC. During his time at the school, Jaime produced stories on displacement in the South Bronx, tenant-landlord disputes in Brooklyn, an interactive project on gunshot victims, and a radio and print piece on the impact on immigrants of marijuana decriminalization.

Jaime will receive the award at the J-school’s annual Awards for Excellence dinner on May 19th.

The Best of the Week’s News: 

• Workers have to be paid for standing in security lines, California Supreme Court rules. 
   
• No middle name? No visa! The Trump’s new dirty trick to exclude immigrants. 
   
• What happens to workers when two organic grocery stores implode? The latest from Sara DiNatale, participant in Hillman’s Reporting the U.S. Workplace program.
   
• Trump’s budget strips all funding from Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper of the U.S. military. 
   
• Even short-term foster stays can be brutal for kids.

The Best of the Week’s News: 

• 12 people have died violently in Mississippi State prisons this month. 
   
• Senate investigators interview IRS whistleblower about alleged interference in Trump or Pence audit. 
   
• Trump-appointed federal judge belittles trans woman seeking justice. 
   
• Federal labor law makes it too hard to form a union.

Sidney’s Picks: 

• NYC mulls half-billion-dollar bailout for taxi drivers victimized by bad loans
   
• Twitter vs. Facebook: Do facts matter in political ads?
   
• Big structural change for the New York Times’ Opinion section 
   
• Philly starts shaming businesses that flout the city’s labor laws.