WDET Hires Civic Reporter to Cover City Meetings with Detroit Documenters
WDET’s Eleanore Catolico will work with the Detroit Documenters program to find and interpret news emerging out of public meetings.
101.9 WDET, Detroit’s public radio station, has hired Eleanore Catolico as Civic Reporter, working with Citizen Detroit, Outlier Media and WDET’s Detroit Documenters program to report on public meetings and related city activity.
The Documenters program recruits area residents to attend meetings and take notes on matters of public interest. The program trains Documenters to take detailed notes, live tweet and produce related media from meetings. The program was originally pioneered by Chicago’s City Bureau and brought to Detroit through a grant from the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan’s Detroit Journalism Engagement Fund.
“These meetings often go uncovered by journalists, so my role is to work in collaboration with Documenters to generate reporting that is of interest to the people of the city of Detroit,” says Catolico.
Resources related to the Documenters program can be found at documenters.org.
Catolico was born in Detroit and raised in the suburbs. She began her career in Chicago covering criminal justice and education and was part of the inaugural cohort of City Bureau’s civic reporting fellowship program in 2015 as well as the organization’s Documenters program. She was a finalist for a 2018 Peter Lisagor Award in education reporting for her profile “Losing Harper High School.”
After returning to Detroit last year, Catolico completed fellowships with the Detroit Equity Action Lab and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, focusing on water quality and affordability.
