Dawn is a Journalist and Staff Writer with the Global Sisters Report, an online publication of news centered on Catholic nuns around the world. Dawn covers a mix of personal topics, such as one nun’s mission in the Arctic Circle, as well as breaking news, like a group of Pennsylvania nuns who built a chapel in the direct path of an oil pipeline. Working out of her home, Dawn spends the majority of her time on the phone researching stories; either a month for personal projects or as little as an hour for breaking news.
Transcript
My name is Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, and I am a journalist and staff writer at Global Sisters Report. The Global Sisters Report is the nun vertical for the National Catholic Reporter, so we are a journalism project that is all about Catholic nuns all around the world, and I write about nuns every day. I am very, very blessed at Global Sisters Report that my kind of output, my schedule is whatever I want it to be. (laughs) We're an online only publication, so we don't have print deadlines. I'm just wrapping up a story now that I've been working on for two months, which is a luxury we don't often have in journalism anymore, but I like it 'cause I like to write long, I like to write slow. I'm a magazine girl through and through. So I am really into social justice issues, so I find whatever it is. I've written on mass incarceration, food access, racism in the church, racism in the community, and I find the nuns who are doing ministries in that. I've also, you know, written the one-off stories about nuns doing cool things like a 74-year-old nun who lives in the Arctic Circle doing a ministry there with the native community because that's what she wanted to do after her retirement. A lot of the times I do pick my own topics. I like to consider those my passion projects. I do about three a year because I take a little bit longer to work on those, but I do also do breaking nun news, it does happen, so we've got right now some nuns, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Pennsylvania, who are trying to stop a pipeline from being installed in their land, so they've built a chapel over the pathway, and so I'm constantly chasing their court cases and their court appearances, so I can write breaking news on what's happening with the nuns' pipeline. (laughs) So once I have an idea for a story, or it is assigned to me, I get on the phone and I call, call, call, call, call. I think one of the things I was surprised to learn about journalism is that it's not a lot of going in the field and you know, talking to people, man on the street anymore. It's a lot of sitting at your desk and calling people. So I call lots of nuns, lots of institutions that might be nun-adjacent, or at least Catholic institutions, and then I find who I need to talk to and I ask them all the relevant questions or ask them who I need to talk to if they're not the right person, and I probably report, depending on the story, for a month if it's one of the longer stories. If it's a deadline story, I spend an hour reporting and then I start writing.
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