We look South

I’ve been thinking about what 2024 holds domestically for news coverage. And I keep returning to this: In 2024, we look South.

Between the upcoming presidential election and the continued reverberations of the Dobbs decision, the region deserves and will see an uptick in national media attention next year. That’s where my forecast stops. It’s also where my hopes pick up.

“Who’s being left behind?” As a journalist, it’s a question I haven’t been able to shake. I suspect, in large part, that the reason it looms so large for me is because I’ve grown up and spent my professional life to date in one of the nation’s most vulnerable states.

Keeping that question close led me to report on the lack of public safe rooms in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of a deadly tornado this spring, concerns about a state-run police force’s shootings, and hospitals closing their labor and delivery departments in neighboring Alabama. It’s the question I plan to keep using as my guiding theme in 2024.

“Who’s being left behind?” It’s a question that I’m confident many of my peers have at the forefront in major news cycles that bring them to this region. I’ve seen the power that question holds when you seek it in quiet moments too. I think of my colleagues’ work uncovering how men were buried in a Mississippi county’s pauper’s field without their loved ones’ knowledge.

I think of journalists in Alabama and Mississippi who won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting this year for their respective investigations into a small town’s police force and the misuse of welfare funds.

In 2024, we look South. I hope we’ll keep looking after, too.