Max Blau
Civic Innovation Fellow 2018 2019
The atlanta news project
Mission
The Atlanta News Project’s mission is to tell more relevant stories about Atlanta, to have those storytellers reflect the region’s diversity, and to value the work of local journalism appropriately by paying local journalists what they’re worth.
Summary
The Atlanta News Project is a non-profit venture that addresses the lack of meaningful journalism that informs, confronts, and challenges our understandings of Atlanta. Despite journalism being one of America's largest media markets, Max notes the shortage of impactful local journalism, and he hopes to address this issue through the creation of a media outlet that produces narrative stories which foster a more just, inclusive, and engaged metro region. His program also works to train residents to report on stories about their own communities that they want to be heard.
Experience
A recent graduate of the University of Georgia's narrative nonfiction M.F.A. program, Max is currently working as a freelance journalist, writing about health care, criminal justice, and inequity through the South. Max has written narrative and investigative stories for newspapers, magazines, and digital media outlets, and his award-winning nonfiction has appeared in Atlanta magazine, Bitter Southerner, the Boston Globe, New York Times, Politico, and Rolling Stone.