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Josiah Bates is a journalist, author, and journalism professor.
He's a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence in America. He focuses on the Great Lakes region.
Josiah was born and raised in an old-school Caribbean household in Brooklyn. While growing up, his cousins, uncles, and friends were all into sports, but he gravitated toward writing and storytelling for some reason. As a middle schooler, English papers and written work were the only assignments he could hope to get a B or higher on. Even though several teachers told him it wasn't "realistic," he decided to pursue writing as a career.
It wasn't until high school that Josiah caught the sports bug and started playing and following basketball. His interest in sports and consistent passion for storytelling opened his eyes to sports reporting. When he went to college at Pennsylvania State University in Fall 2011, sports journalism was the major he settled on.
For the first couple of years, he covered a variety of Penn State sports, hosted a sports talk radio show, and did several sports journalism internships. The shift came around his junior year, in the wake of several high-profile police killings, the Trayvon Martin incident and other criminal justice-related issues that captured the national spotlight. With the topic in the news, reflecting on his family's history with the criminal justice system inspired his pivot away from sports journalism. While a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism student, Josiah worked on his reporting, writing and video skills. He began covering crime-related topics in the New York City area. He wrote his master's project on the formation of a new community policing initiative the NYPD started. One of the testing grounds for the plan was in his hometown: Brownsville.
Josiah started his professional career in NBC News and ABC News fellowships, focusing on video content. He worked on projects for Dateline, NBC Digital, and 20/20. However, during his fellowship at ABC, he got the chance to report on criminal justice issues for real. His first major story was covering the 2018 shooting of Stephon Clark, a young Black man who was killed by police officers in Sacramento. Josiah was the first reporter at a major news outlet to cover the story. From there, he continued his work on the beat. He put together enough clips to get a reporter position at TIME Magazine in 2019.
While at TIME, Josiah immersed himself in the criminal justice beat and did hundreds of stories on gun violence, policing, prisons, jails and criminal justice policy issues across the country. During his tenure at TIME, he returned to Columbia as an adjunct faculty member in the journalism school. His coverage of gun violence led to his nonfiction book, "In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner City Gun Violence", which came out in May 2024. After TIME, Josiah joined TheGrio, a Black-led news outlet. He remained on the criminal justice beat but branched out a bit, covering other topics around disparities and inequalities impacting the Black community. Along with his work at the Trace, he's freelancing for several publications, working on his second book and still teaching journalism at Columbia. He also runs a Substack page.
In his free time, Josiah plays in rec basketball leagues, writes screenplays and constantly rewatches "The Wire."
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