On this episode, we're joined by Tara García Mathewson. Tara is a bilingual reporter covering the intersection of education and technology, particularly the harms within them, both on a national and state level for The Markup and CalMatters.

The Markup is a non-profit newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good. A motto often within its stories is 'report deeply and fix things.' Its stories combine news reporting and data analysis and 'The Markup Method' means they show their work.

CalMatters is a non-partisan and non-profit news organization covering California policies and politics to make the government more transparent and accountable.

Tara talked about her experience covering artificial intelligence, technological surveillance, and digital censorship in education and the work that went into specific stories. She also spoke about the benefit of getting a background in newspaper reporting before working for non-profit journalism outlets.

At the end of the episode, we were joined by Chris Daggett, interim executive director of the New Jersey Information Consortium, which provides funding to online news outlets and students interested in studying journalism. Chris talked about potential budget cuts that would jeopardize what the organization is able to do. You can learn more about it and what you can do to help here.

https://njcivicinfo.org/

Work examples:

Digital Book Banning

https://themarkup.org/digital-book-banning/2024/04/13/schools-were-just-supposed-to-block-porn-instead-they-sabotaged-homework-and-censored-suicide-prevention-sites

Technological surveillance

https://themarkup.org/machine-learning/2023/11/30/he-wanted-privacy-his-college-gave-him-none

Artificial intelligence

https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/03/school-counselors-ai-chatbots/

Tara's salutes: The 74, Caitlin Dickerson (The Atlantic), Hannah Dreier (New York Times)

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