The Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) was born from a situation of precisely that: financial insecurity. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the seminal 1996 work, “Nickel and Dimed,” co-founded the journalism non-profit in 2012, as Americans were trudging through the wreckage of the Great Recession. Nearly a decade later, the coronavirus pandemic has cast even sharper light on the Hardship Reporting Project’s through-line: how widening income inequality between the wealthy, middle class and working poor is defining the American story.

The project’s mission is not only to develop immersive stories that humanize inequality, but also to support the freelancers producing this work — the same people who are often struggling themselves to get by in a contracting industry getting further walloped by the pandemic. “My job is to put band-aids on gushing wounds,” says David Wallis, managing director of EHRP. (His email signature includes this quippy tagline: ‘Saving an endangered species: Journalists.’)

Read the full interview in Nieman Storyboard.