MISSION STATEMENT:

NAHJ Investigative & Data Journalism Task Force was created in 2021 to be a driving force to reverse in measurable ways the history of racist and discriminatory hiring in the U.S. media and help to diversify investigative teams and increase the presence of Latinos — from team leaders, to reporters and data teams — in newsrooms across the country. Our task force functions with the belief that diversity is meaningless without power, equity, and justice.

WHAT WE’VE DONE:

The task force has three subcommittees — reporters and data reporters subcommittee, management subcommittee and academics subcommittee. 

The three groups has worked in collaboration on several initiatives: 

  • Organizing and providing virtual training for members — most notably the Watchdog Corner series — and training for the annual conference. 

  • Building a survey that has been distributed in newsrooms across the nation to measure demographics in investigative teams and the managers who lead them. 

  • Latino Watchdog Series published by Poynter in English and Spanish to amplify our voice with our personal experiences and the journey that led each member to become a journalist. 

Investigative & Data Journalism Task Force Board

Mc Nelly Torres

Co-chair

Yvette Cabrera

Co-chair

Mc Nelly Torres is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor at the Center for Public Integrity where she leads an award-winning team investigating inequality. Previously, Torres worked as an investigative producer for NBC6 in Miami and co-founded FCIR.org. Torres is a product of newspapers including the Sun-Sentinel and the San Antonio Express-News. Torres was the first Latina to be elected to the boards of directors of the Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Florida Society of News Editors. She has trained thousands of journalists in investigative techniques and data journalism in the U.S. and Latin America. Torres has earned over two dozen awards throughout her career, including an Emmy for her work at NBC, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and several awards from organizations such as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Education Writers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. She was inducted in NAHJ’s Hall of Fame in 2018. She’s currently serving on the board of directors of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and NAHJ. Torres was a recipient of the Gwen Ifill Award  in 2022. 

Cortez began his career as a reporting stringer for the LA Times and LA Daily News out of high school. During his college years, he participated in photography internships ranging from Spanish publications in Dallas and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, a mid-size paper in West Texas and The Associated Press in Chicago.

Yvette is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity covering inequality in economic and social well-being. Most recently she worked as an environmental justice reporter for Grist & HuffPost, and as an investigative reporter for ThinkProgress in Washington D.C. She reports at the intersection of justice and equity, examining the impact of systemic disparities, such as environmental pollution and contamination, on marginalized communities throughout the country. She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination across the country, including an investigation on the legacy of industrial lead pollution in urban residential neighborhoods as a 2019 McGraw Center for Business Journalism fellow, and a five-part investigative series where she showed through soil testing how lead exposure is still harming children in complex ways. In 2022, she was selected as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center practitioner to create a journalist’s guide for reporting on soil lead contamination. She currently serves as president for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; and for two decades served as a board member of CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, the oldest regional organization of journalists of color in the country.

HOW TO JOIN:

Want to get involved and engage with journalists that share your similar interest? Here’s how to get started:

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