New Mexico In Depth welcomes reporter Shaun Griswold to our team beginning next week. Shaun is Pueblo from Laguna, Jemez and Zuni, and grew up in Albuquerque and Gallup.
He brings a decade of print and broadcast news experience to our team. He’s covered Rocky Mountain fire seasons, local police reform, and, as he is sure to note, the Denver Broncos and Kendrick Lamar.
We’re thrilled by the opportunity to work with Shaun, thanks to Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities through its reporting corps. Report for America is an initiative of the nonprofit news organization, The GroundTruth Project. He joins 225 reporters placed by the program in 162 newsrooms around the country, from a pool of more than 1,800 applicants.
For New Mexico In Depth, Shaun will focus on issues important to urban Indigenous people in Albuquerque, as well as tribal communities throughout New Mexico, including education, child welfare, and more.
“I’m excited to join the ranks of Indigenous journalists at Indian Country Today, Navajo Times, High Country News and every publication focused on expanding news for thriving Indigenous communities that demand coverage,” he says about this opportunity.
Native Americans compose 11% of the New Mexico state population, and Albuquerque is home to one of the largest communities of urban Indian people in the country. We’ve worked toward creating a reporting position that focuses on issues important to Native communities for quite some time. It is an incredibly important task that, in our estimation, the broad field of journalism does a poor job of undertaking.
It’s notable that just as we welcome Shaun, we are in the midst of a global pandemic where, in New Mexico, more than 40% of identified positive cases have afflicted people in tribal communities. We expect, like all of our reporters, he will tackle how COVID-19 is affecting our communities. But he will also tackle other consequential issues that affect Native people in Albuquerque and beyond, that deserve our reporting.
Please join us in welcoming Shaun to our team. You can find him on Twitter: @shaun505.
And if you agree that this reporting is important, please help us sustain this work in the coming years. Report for America very generously provides almost half of the funding for this position. The rest will come from our community.