The Trace’s mission as a nonprofit newsroom is to shine a light on the issue of gun violence in the United States by making the problem clear in our reporting, directing attention to the communities most affected by the violence and reporting on solutions to the problems. My first project [LINK: https://www.thetrace.org/2020/07/gun-violence-prevention-defund-police-birmingham-alabama/] at The Trace, published in July, aligned with these aspects of The Trace’s mission. As part of the project, I reported on a community-led effort to establish a gun violence prevention program in Birmingham, Alabama, my home state. Birmingham has one of the country’s highest rates of fatal shootings, and because it is a smaller city in a southern state, that fact often goes ignored. But in my piece, I aimed to shine a light on gun violence in Birmingham and how community activists and faith leaders are coming together to try to solve the problem without more police.

I worked on several other projects during my time at The Trace, as well, including a report, authored by Lakeidra Chavis, on spiking suicides among Black residents in Chicago and surrounding Cook County. Part of that project involved gathering data from coroners and medical examiners from across the country to highlight trends that weren’t being addressed. After we published our report, Cook County pledged to address the rising suicides. This project is expanding beyond Illinois and is ongoing. Meanwhile, I also reported with my colleagues on how mass shootings — despite misinformation to the contrary — are soaring in 2020 and hitting Black neighborhoods the hardest.

I use the skills I developed at Columbia Journalism School every single day of my fellowship. My master’s degree in journalism, with a concentration in politics, gave me a well-rounded understanding of government in the United States that has been invaluable during my reporting at The Trace, which often involved the law and politics because the issue of guns and gun violence has been so politicized. Investigative skills and data skills I learned in courses at Columbia were helpful when reporting the Cook County story because it required filing public records requests and digging through hundreds of pages of records and data. Without my courses with Professors Nicholas Lemann and Alexander Stille, I would have a much narrower and more superficial understanding of the lobby and interest groups, which account for a large part of our reporting at The Trace. Moreover, I have been able to put to use all of the feedback I received from professors about my writing style. I know that my writing and reporting skills have vastly improved thanks to the education I’ve received at Columbia, and I would not have been nearly as successful during this fellowship had it not been for that education.

My internship began during the height of the pandemic, which presented a number of challenges. For one, I have never met my colleagues in person. I know my coworkers only over Zoom and phone calls, which has been a challenge. My supervisors and colleagues at The Trace, though, have done everything in their power to make me feel comfortable and as part of the team during these difficult times. I’ve had weekly check-ins with my supervisor, and I’ve had video chats with just about every member of the team — on top of our weekly meetings. I wish things were different and that we would have been able to meet in person, but we have definitely been able to make the best of a pretty impossible situation. While it’s far more difficult to brainstorm and work on joint projects over Zoom and Slack, we made it work, and I have learned so much from colleagues in a short period of time despite these challenges.

My goals for this fellowship included improving my writing and reporting skills and really working on the type of longform, investigative, enterprise reporting that I was taught to do at Columbia Journalism School. And I definitely think The Trace has been an excellent place to do that. I would say I accomplished my goal. During the fellowship, I’ve had five articles published under my byline or a co-byline [LINK: https://www.thetrace.org/author/chip-brownlee/] , and I’ve worked on numerous other projects. Through all of that, I think my writing has become more concise, clear, and effective. My reporting has been made better through editors who push me to get more and reveal more in my work.

My main take away from The Trace, though, is how important our work is. In the few months I worked there, I saw what kind of impact good work can have — whether it is my story on community-led gun violence prevention in Alabama, or our projects on mass shootings and rising suicides. Each of these stories garnered a response from the public and from leaders in government who might not have done so without our work.