Unraveled Press and LA Taco, the inaugural winners of the Snooping Newsies.

Back in 2022, Magic: The Gathering, the endless card game that usually features wizards and dragons battling in high-fantasy settings, released a new set of cards called "Streets of New Capenna," which was set in a new world in the game's multiverse that was essentially 1920s America, with five demonic crime families battling for control of the city of New Capenna. All the cards had a beautiful art-deco approach to their illustrations, and the nod to the gritty mob battles of the 20s was a nice change of pace to the usual flavor of the game.

But among all the devil-mobsters, bird bootleggers and rhino thugs was a journalist, dead set on exposing the corruption of New Capenna in the form of the card Snooping Newsie. The card was designed to reflect the work of muckraking journalism: it got stronger the more cards it exposed and, if it really did the work, it brought new life to the player. Snooping Newsie was a little too finicky to be particularly useful in actual gameplay, but I was immediately hooked: I mean come on, it was a journalist in Magic: The Gathering!

I never forgot that card.

This year has been hard—perhaps the understatement of the year, I know—but one thing that has stood out to me throughout this endless struggle of a year has been the importance of small-scale, truly independent journalism to stand up for communities and to expose the abuses and corruption of the powerful. Nowhere has this work been more critical than in covering the raids of our communities by ICE and the US Border Patrol, where tiny news organizations with no budget and barely any staff have been a critical lifeline to understand the scale and impact of these attacks on our neighbors, our family, and our friends.

This year, as I was turning to tiny news orgs to find out what was happening down the street from me, I remembered that Magic: The Gathering card again, that Snooping Newsie and her dogged pursuit to expose the ills on the streets in order to bring new life to her community. It felt exactly like what was happening right now.

And so today I am thrilled to announce the inaugural recipients of the Snooping Newsie Award for Excellence in Independent Journalism. The award—which is for community-focused, independently-owned newsrooms with a staff of less than ten—is in recognition of the fearless work, commitment, and effort that goes into producing vital reporting for your community, on no budget, with no net.

The winners of this award should likely come as no surprise to those who have been reading my writing this year as I've called out their exemplary work before:

Unraveled Press

Based here in Chicago, Unraveled Press is a newsroom of just two people, Steve Held and Raven Geary. Raven and Steve not only got shot and arrested in their coverage of ICE's occupation of our region this fall, but were out on the streets or at the Broadview detention facility almost every day working tirelessly to expose the brutality of the federal agents and to speak up for the peope and communities that they attacked. Unraveled was also part of coalition of news organizations that filed suit against the federal government for violating their First-Amendment rights in deliberately targeting journalists during the occupation. Even as the fed attacks have slowed, Unraveled has continued to do vital work, exposing corruption in the Chicago Police Department just this week.

LA Taco

Based in Los Angeles, LA Taco was founded in 2006 to cover the street food scene in LA. This summer, when federal agents started snatching food vendors off the streets of Los Angeles, the tiny staff of LA Taco realized that their reporting beat had to immediately and dramatically change. They rose to the challenge, offering some of the best street-level coverage of the assault on Los Angeles. This culminated in creating their excellent Daily Memo, a brief-but-complete roundup of all the reports of ICE attacks across the huge LA region every day. The Memo, hosted by producer Memo Torres, is in my opinion the gold standard in how to do this kind of wide-angle coverage on a shoestring budget and every day I wish it was being copied by small news orgs in every community targeted by ICE.

Doing this work, in this way, is nearly impossible. I know because I've lived it. To do it under the conditions that the Unraveled and LA Tacos teams did this year, when the entire weight of the federal government is threatening to come down on you, is a miracle. And, because it's done on no budget, because it's done without institutional backing, because it's done with a point-of-view and a middle finger raised, it will be overlooked by the traditional awarding bodies.

That's where the Snooping Newsies come in. This is a small act of recognition that this work matters, that this work is important, and that these newsrooms deserve an award just as much as the big orgs, if not more.

Unraveled and LA Taco will each get a plaque and a copy of the foil-edition Snooping Newsie card in an acrylic case. I'd love to include a cash award, but, well, *stares in broke*. So here's my ask of you: What if we all gave them that cash award? What if you donated to Unraveled and gave to LA Taco today? If each of us tossed even $10 their way, that would make a huge impact on their bottom line at the end of the year. A community-funded award for community-first journalism. That sounds right. Please give a little something.

Mostly, please give a shit. Folks like Unraveled and LA Taco are doing this because journalism is a calling, and when done right it builds and strengthens the communities that it is a part of. The only way organizations this small survive is by you caring. Supporting with money—sure of course absolutely 100% yes, that—but also supporting by sharing their reporting and uplifting their work. Everything depends on voices like Unraveled Press and LA Taco, now more than ever.