Meet the editors from our English edition
Dear readers,
this summer we’d like you to get to know our team a bit better, in this case mainly the editors from our English edition. Lizzie, Leslie and Heidi have become a great, stable and powerful team – something that’s not at all natural in the world of volunteering. Here’s what they say about finding their way to Squirrel News and their motivation to push the project.
Elizabeth Jacyshyn-Owen
Lizzie joined Squirrel News right in the beginning and was already an editor when we launched our app and website in 2020. She’s incredibly fast and accurate, and has spent hundreds of hours working on our editions by now.
After a long stint as a music journalist in Berlin, I decided to step back from the industry to seek out more meaningful, constructive projects – but in traditional media, bad news spreads faster than gossip at a family holiday dinner. Solutions journalism is like the one sane person pointing out that the house isn’t actually on fire; it’s just a little smoky because someone forgot to turn off the stove. Instead of just highlighting problems and leaving us feeling helpless, SoJo offers a much-needed counterbalance to the relentless negativity of standard news coverage.
Aside from my work at Squirrel News, I’m also a writer, translator, and editor.
Leslie Boltron
Leslie joined Squirrel News in 2022. She stayed with us ever since then, and it’s still amazing to see how she manages to work full-time, study in an exciting master’s programme and at the same time edit one Squirrel News edition every week.
As a former broadcast journalist for an international news outlet, I covered many tough stories that reflected the world’s difficult realities. It was easy to feel overwhelmed. However, I discovered a new love for journalism through a grant that introduced me to solutions journalism. When I moved to Berlin, I was fortunate to come across Squirrel News, where I get to search for and share positive stories that highlight solutions. By doing this, we aim to create a ripple effect and inspire people to take action when they see effective solutions. As an optimist, this work is incredibly fulfilling and gives me hope – I love bringing that sense of optimism to our audience.
Heidi Gulick
Heidi joined the team in 2023. Even though she’s semi-retired already and faces health problems from time to time, she spends hours doing research for our editions every week, enriching our editions with news stories, sources, and valuable comments.
Working for Squirrel News has been like coming full circle for me. From an early career in journalism and editing a weekly countywide newspaper in Massachusetts, that was itself a kind of early iteration of constructive news on a local level, my life has taken a number of twists and turns: new career starts, children and grandchildren, illness and health, and relocation to another place on the globe. Now 9/10ths retired, the journey has led back to constructive news.
In the current moment constructive news is something the world community needs more than ever: not just good news, which is always a nice thing, but news that shows us solutions to problems faced by our communities, country and world. The research that seemed at first like it might be too much like doom-scrolling is really more like hope scrolling, for all the constructive problem-solving stories that are out there but are almost never on page one of newspapers nor easily found in the sensational clickbait of search engines and social media. And the effect is cumulative. There is so much ingenuity, creativity, discovery and hard work going on all around us from which we can be inspired and take hope. One really gets a sense of that from our monthly recap, highlighting 25 or so of the many stories published in the preceding month – all those solutions, piling up. It gives me the sense, that yes, all is not lost, we can do this!
The donations from our English-speaking readers are still far from what our editors in the English editions would deserve. If you start a recurring donation here, they will directly benefit from it.
All the best,
Your Squirrel News Team
