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What We're Reading: The Death of a Young, Black Journalist

 Charnice Milton
Charnice Milton
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The Death of a Young, Black Journalist: Slain 27-year-old journalist Charnice Milton was leaving a community meeting when she was hit by a stray bullet in the neighborhood she covered in Anacostia, D.C., the New Yorker reports. She was completely dedicated to community news when mainstream outlets in D.C. focused on the worst of her neighborhood. Deputy Editor Jen Sabella sees this loyalty to local reporting in so many DNAinfo reporters and totally believes in Charnice's vision. What a loss:

"The most basic instinct of a local reporter is to take the importance of her neighbors as a given. In a community like Anacostia—where more than ninety per cent of residents are African-American, one in two kids lives below the poverty line, and incarceration and unemployment rates are among the nation’s highest—this is another way of saying that black lives matter. Sometimes, for Milton, that meant writing up community meetings, where neighbors protested shoddy development projects or called out the predations of banks. Other times, it meant documenting the impact of mass incarceration block by block.

...

"She might have covered a vigil like her parents’. Or she might have been busy with public hearings, and with local geeks and students and growers of things."

TIF funds for teachers: Mayor Rahm Emanuel is asking the city council to approve $20 million in tax-increment financing funds toward a 16-classroom addition underway at Walter Payton College Prep, reporter David Matthews is reading in the Chicago Tribune. The proposal, the biggest among a handful of school-related TIF proposals introduced Wednesday, arrives as Chicago Public Schools grapples with a budget deficit that has soared to more than $1 billion. The Payton annex, which is under construction after being approved by the city two years ago, will boost the school's enrollment by 400 students. 

Peace, Love and Business: As we don our leather fringed vests and smoke our, uh, funny cigarettes at Lollapalooza this weekend, few will pause to ponder the festival's true purpose: a giant cash cow for the world's largest live entertainment company. The Wall Street Journal, however, points out that Lollapalooza is part of a $6 billion North American concert industry, with Live Nation leading the charge.

The race to produce and acquire festivals comes with downsides: The market might be becoming so saturated that companies have more power to raise tickets prices and create homogenous, major lineups.

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