Morning light, five years ago, I sat down with a coffee and a shiny new assignment: a year to cover the foster care system. One subject. No fixed deadlines. What could possibly go wrong?
By afternoon, my chest tightened. My yearlong project was doomed. Every article I read struck the same note: tragedy. Academic journals, on the other hand, burst at the seams with topics we ought to be covering: parsing poverty from neglect, illuminating racial disparities, perpetual workforce crisis and much more.
How, I wondered, had we missed all of this?
Fast forward: my one-year sprint morphed into a five-year marathon — and counting — bearing impact I hadn’t dared imagine: state and local legislation, council hearings, and real money committed to solutions.
I even got to lead a Poynter seminar on child welfare reporting that motivated me as much as it did the reporters in the room.
They came from 25 news organizations — print, broadcast, digital. And they got it: foster care isn’t a niche story. It’s a $10 billion federal line item — with additional billions spent locally — tied to youth homelessness, incarceration, school failure, and a litany of medical issues, all bearing their own economic and societal costs.
Coverage matters every day — not only when a child dies.
The challenge? Time. Reporters want to dig in, but newsrooms are stretched thin. My pitch: Treat child welfare as a sub-beat. File the records request. Make that one fresh call. Don’t wait for funerals to cover the system.
Our guest speakers hammered this home. April Lee, who co-founded Philly Voice For Change, reminded us that kids in foster care aren’t case files but human beings. Most aren’t victims of abuse at all — about 85% are placed because of neglect, often attributable to poverty. Her advice: Talk to people with lived experience. But don’t subject them to smash-and-grab exercises to get a quote. Listen.
Finding the activists and young people aging out of the system — try your local youth advocacy organizations — will reveal that these are “human beings who can be helped without taking kids away from their families.”
Diana Denza from the Center for Family Representation asks reporters to be flexible about scheduling interviews. Work commitments for people in the system often won’t permit contact between 9 and 5. Understand that some trauma remains too raw to share. But lawyers, advocates and families can open a story up.
“Our parent advocates and former clients, who have firsthand experience with systems of family policing, can provide the personal anecdotes that are often necessary to establish an emotional hook for stories,” she said. “Oftentimes, system-involved parents are unfairly demonized by the press or their perspectives are not covered at all.”
We also heard directly from system veterans like Linda Spears and Vicky Kelly, leaders with the Child Welfare League of America, who admitted that agencies duck press calls because coverage fixates on failure. It’s a reminder of a raw truth: Directors typically lack the political cover to speak frankly about structural flaws. That puts the onus on us: Dig into staffing records, caseload sizes, racial disproportionality, and follow the money. Also, call the former system leaders who will share what sitting officials can’t.
During our sessions, hope and realism dueled. Heads nodded and energy rose, but staff shortages, deadline pressure — the usual culprits — stalked the room.
The fix isn’t impossible: One public records request. One extra call a week. That’s how we bring light to the dark.
This story was produced through Poynter’s Covering Child Welfare training, supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
