Filling gaps in community news, learning skills, earning money

BY JON MARCUS
AARP

ChrisAnna Mink was 60 when she started her second career, as a newspaper reporter at The Modesto Bee in California.

“We have to make people remember there are little faces and little people that go with the statistics” about poor health, poverty, and hunger, she says. “If I wrote those stories, maybe change would happen.”

Mink went back to school to get a master’s degree in specialized journalism at the University of Southern California and signed on with Report for America, which places journalists in newsrooms to report about under-covered people and topics.

Mink wasn’t surprised to find that she was much older than her Report for America colleagues, who are 26, on average. “A lot of the things we had as shared experiences were because [the RFA fellows] were the same age as my son,” she says.

But people age 50 and older are becoming increasingly familiar sights on the citizen-journalism beat as news outlets are hollowed out due to budget cuts, a process that threatens to leave important events uncovered and essential decisions unexamined.