25 26 Arrested Reporters and What They Do

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who’ve been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional “objective” news organizations; others work for “non-objective” news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader. This means something — mostly about the media and what it is now, possibly also who the police perceive as media and relation of reporter to demonstration. But with the exception of a Journal-Sentinel photographer, two AP folks and one Daily News reporter, no major traditional news outlets have (yet!) had staff reporters or photographers arrested. As Erika Fry pointed out last month in CJR, this also has to do with who police departments consider a journalist, and why they decide that. (Turns out, wearing a shirt that says “reporter” doesn’t always help in the eyes of the police, as one Rochester student discovered.) A minimum of 40% of people news-gathering who were arrested are women.

• Natasha Lennard: Non-contract freelancer, now not covering politics for the Times.

• Kristen Gwynne: freelance writer and editorial assistant, Alternet.

• Marisa Holmes: Documentary filmmaker and activist, OWS organizer.

• John Farley: multimedia web editor, WNET/Thirteen’s MetroFocus.

• Bob Plain: recently laid off, at the time of the arrest was a digital reporter for WPRO.

• Jonathan Meador, reporter, Nashville Scene.

• Susie Cagle, freelance artist and cartoonist.

• Ian Graham, freelance photographer, RVA Magazine.

• Kristyna Wentz-Graff, staff photographer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinal.

• Stephanie Pharr, intern, Creative Loafing.

• Alisen Redmond, Kenneshaw State University Sentinel.

• Judith Kim, Georgia State University Signal.

• Jonathan Foster, photographer, Rochester Institute of Technology’s student Reporter Magazine.

• Julie Walker, freelancer, NPR.

• Jared Malsin, freelancer, East Village Local The Local East Village (a “collaboration” of often unpaid labor between NYU and the New York Times).

• Unknown, photographer, Agence France-Presse.

• Justin Bishop, photographer on assignment for Vanity Fair.

• Matthew Lysiak, reporter, New York Daily News.

• Karen Matthews, AP reporter.

• Seth Wenig, AP photographer.

• Patrick Hedlund, news editor, DNAinfo.

• Paul Lomax, freelance photographer.

• Doug Higginbotham, a freelance video journalist, TV New Zealand.

• Ryan Harvey, musician, correspondent for Indyreader.

• J.A. Myerson, freelancer, TruthOut.

• Keith Gessen, editor, n+1. (Along with “kathleen ross, and sarah leonard of n+1, dissent, and the #ows gazette” as per Charles Petersen. They were not engaged in reporting per se, but in demonstrating. But where do reporting and demonstrating diverge? There will be an essay to tell us about that later, I suspect.)

Keith Gessen arrest photo from this morning by Daniel Massey.

Photo of Rochester Reporter reporter being arrested by Dan DeFelippi.