Community Reporter Fellow

The Emerging Reporter Fellowship

The Parlor Magazine is an independent feminist cultural and political publication covering the intersections of identity, power, land, and community. We are an early-stage, volunteer-led publication, fiscally sponsored by The Tiny News Collective. 

What is the Emerging Reporter Fellowship?

This is an ongoing, rolling fellowship — not a cohort with a fixed end date. Fellows join The Parlor's global network of community journalists and become part of a collaborative digital newsroom where stories are pitched, developed, and published together.

At its core, this is a learning experience. It is structured to teach you how a real newsroom works from the inside — how a story moves from an instinct to a pitch to a published piece — with mentorship at every stage.

Fellows will:

• -Pitch and develop their own stories with full editorial mentorship
• -Participate in monthly writers room sessions where story ideas are discussed, timelines are set, and collaborations between writers, photographers, and multimedia contributors are built
• -Learn how to develop a source list and conduct outreach
• -Complete structured learning workshops and curriculum, and access free learning opportunities offered by partners across our networks
• -Have the full experience of working in a real, living newsroom
• -Be published in an internationally distributed feminist publication

This is not a passive learning experience. You'll learn by doing real reporting — on stories that matter, in communities you already know and trust — with mentorship and editing at every step.

Who we're looking for

• -Emerging journalists, writers, and storytellers who are inside the communities they report on — proximity and trust matter as much as writing ability
• -People with an interest in journalism that names harm, interrogates power, and centres community voices
• -Alignment with anticolonial, intersectional feminist values
• -Willingness to pitch independently and take editorial feedback seriously
• -No formal journalism experience required — we will teach you

The stories we want

• -Land rights, displacement, and environmental justice
• -Community resistance and organising — grassroots movements, coalitions, and alternatives being built outside mainstream visibility
• -Colonialism as a present-tense reality — housing, borders, language, identity, and the structures that persist
• -Women, queer, and marginalised voices in political struggle — as protagonists and organisers, not victims
• -Alternative community wealth building — cooperatives, small businesses, and economic models that emerge from communities themselves
• -Culture as survival — the politics of art, music, literature, and food in communities holding themselves together

The support you'll receive

You will not be reporting alone. Every fellow works with the backing of a real publication and a founding team invested in the story getting made. That support includes:

• -Extensive one-on-one editorial mentorship from the founding team, at every stage from first pitch to final edit
• -Structured learning workshops and curriculum that build your reporting skills as you go, plus free learning opportunities offered by partners across our networks
• -Legal support for your reporting where it's needed
• -Help building a source list and making outreach — identifying, approaching, and interviewing the people at the centre of your story
• -Editing and peer editing, including structured feedback from other fellows in the newsroom
• -The institutional backing of The Parlor — a published, internationally distributed feminist publication — to give your stories a home

Story development costs

The Emerging Reporter Fellowship is an unpaid internship. However, where reporting has costs attached, we cover them when they are necessary to the story. Not all reporting has costs, and support is assessed story by story, but where a piece genuinely requires it we can cover things like:

• -Travel and local transport for reporting that has to happen in person
• -Translation and interpretation
• -Records and public information request fees
• -Tools tied to a specific reporting need — a transcription service, for example — for the period you are developing the story

Each fellow receives a budget document that explains how this works. Costs are discussed and approved in advance on a case-by-case basis, so you never carry a reporting expense out of pocket that the story required.

College credit

This fellowship may be eligible for college credit on a case-by-case basis. If you are a student and would like to pursue credit, please contact your school's curriculum, internship, or academic department to find out what they require — arrangements vary from one institution to another, and your school sets the terms. We are glad to complete any paperwork or supervision agreements your programme needs on our end.

How to apply

To apply, submit a story pitch using the link. We want to see how you think about a story — the community it comes from, why it matters now, and why you're the person to tell it. It doesn't need to be polished; it needs to show us the story you'd report and your relationship to it.

Your pitch must follow a who, what, when, where, and why format:

• -Who the story is about, and who you'd talk to
• -What the story is — what is happening, and to whom
• -When it takes place, and why it's timely
• -Where it takes place
• -Why it matters, why now, and why The Parlor

Applications submitted without a pitch will not be considered. The pitch is how we get to know you as a reporter, so it's the one thing we can't assess an application without.

This is an ongoing open call. There is no deadline.