Seattle Times adds columnist tasked with the social justice beat

Tyrone Beason's first column, "A grandmother's love, stories of hardship shaped my vision of justice."

Recently the Washington Post added a Latina columnist, Theresa Vargas, writing on similar issues, and Petula Clark has covered a similar beat for awhile, although her pieces are more focused on individuals, and don't take a structural approach.

This approach to social justice or "local stories and features" is pretty typical of the columnists at  city papers such as Adrian Walker at the Boston Globe and the now retired Jerry Large at the Seattle Times.

WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, which I have written about ("Local television station news: Scripps WCPO in Cincinnati vs. Sinclair Broadcasting Corp.") because it has the deepest news website of all US television stations focused on local news, has a writer, Lucy May, dedicated to the "poverty" beat and they have published some great work, which also makes it to on-air programming.

WCPO's structural approach to writing about poverty, although based in human interest reporting, is likely to remain unique comparatively speaking, when looking at the columns of the various newspaper columnists.