Lewis Raven Wallace | 2022-2024 Fellowship

The Abolition Journalism Fellowship works to support and expand the network of abolitionist journalists across the U.S.; provides messaging, communications, and journalism skills support to grassroots abolitionist groups; and continues to break down the false barrier between “activist” and “journalist” by convening spaces inclusive of both, and creating movement-driven infrastructure for journalism.

Abolitionist stories are being told to large audiences, with a focus on transformative and reparative practices, to ultimately shift the narrative around policing and criminalization in the U.S. centering the interventions of women and LGBTQQI communities. Empowered by narratives of community accountability and transformation, oppressed people can advocate locally for robust non-carceral solutions to violence, harm, and conflict. These efforts are supported by strong practices of journalism, documentation, and storytelling that both create an archive of abolition efforts, and serve as immediate tools for well-informed transition and transformation. This work is undertaken in service to the many abolitionist storytellers whose work has gone unrecognized in the field of journalism.

Abolition Journalism


Don’t Be A Copagandist

A Resource for Media on Covering “Crime” & Violence

Compiled by Mia Henry, Lewis Raven Wallace, and Andrea J. Ritchie with research from No More Police: A Case for Abolition and launched on October 6, 2022. Please email ravenjournalist at gmail.com if you would like access to the Don’t Be A Copagandist event recording.


Additional guides in the “Don’t Be A Copagandist” series:

Abolition Media Office Hours

Staffed by IC Fellow Lewis Raven Wallace, Interrupting Criminalization offers Abolition Media Office Hours for journalists, communicators, and media makers who want to challenge "copaganda," shift the narrative about Palestine, integrate harm reduction and community safety in their work, or directly support incarcerated people in telling their own stories. These office hours are also available to support organizers looking for help on how to build relationships with journalists or hone in on messaging their campaigns. In 2024, Abolition Media Office Hours are on Wednesdays, 3-6 PM and Thursdays 11 AM-3 PM ET.

Organizers & Communicators
Have questions around how to best communicate your vision and organizing strategy to journalists and media makers? Wondering how to counter copaganda? Want to brainstorm around media messaging and outreach?

Journalists
Looking for ideas on how to center community visions in coverage of “crime” and violence rather than reproducing police narratives? Trying to figure out how to collaborate with organizers, connect with incarcerated advocates, to tell different stories about public safety? 

Movement Media Makers
Seeking resources, connections, or supportive conversations as you build your practice?


Things Abolition Media Office Hours Can Help With

  • Tips for talking to journalists (navigating anonymity, being on record/off record, getting your message through, how much to share, giving feedback) 

  • Messaging

  • Media strategy and outreach

  • Pitching stories and op-eds

  • Tips for accountable reporting

  • Tips for collaborative reporting, including collaborations with incarcerated people

  • Tips for sensitive interviews and addressing power dynamics in interviewing

  • Building relationships with “sources” and collaborators

  • Framing abolitionist narratives in your work

  • Working in public media

  • Starting a podcast

  • Starting a media outlet

  • Local reporting and working with local reporters

  • Grassroots fundraising for media projects

  • Grantwriting for media projects

  • Writing and how it is hard and how it can be easy

About Lewis

I am a longtime abolitionist activist and movement journalist, trained in the ‘school of Mariame Kaba’ as well as the shoe leather reporting skills of daily public radio journalism, where I covered economics and the environment for five years. In my twenty years as a writer-activist, I have worked for WBEZ, WYSO, Marketplace, and Scalawag Magazine, freelanced for dozens of independent outlets, and taught hundreds of activists to record and edit interviews and oral histories. In 2017 I was fired from public media for taking a stand against neutrality in the face of authoritarianism. Now I have a book and podcast, The View from Somewhere, about the myth of “objectivity” in journalism and how it has been used to exclude and punish journalists from oppressed communities. 

Before I started in journalism, I was the first volunteer coordinator for Project NIA, co-founder of the Transformative Justice Law Project, and co-founder of Black and Pink Southwest Ohio, and I received training from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and the Catalyst Project about organizing white communities in solidarity with BIPOC-led formations. Together with a collective of journalists and activists, in 2018 I co-founded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective which has been instrumental in driving conversations about the history and practice of movement journalism. My most admired journalistic ancestors include Marvel Cooke, Leslie Feinberg, Ida B. Wells, Andy Kopkind, and Ruben Salazar, who was murdered by L.A. County Sheriffs in 1972. 

I love talking to people and even more than that I love listening, learning, and unlearning. I am a midwestern southerner/southern midwesterner living in Durham, white and transgender, and certified open-water SCUBA diver and member of the emerging Searealists collective. I am also a proud queer co-caretaker of 11 chickens, three potbellied pigs, two Dorper sheep, and a dog named Turtle. We can talk about abolition journalism or we can just talk about pigs; you tell me.