-: My name is Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, and I am a
journalist and staff writer at Global Sisters Report.
The Global Sisters Report is the nun vertical
for the National Catholic Reporter,
so we are a journalism project that is all about
Catholic nuns all around the world,
and I write about nuns every day.
I am very, very blessed at Global Sisters Report
that my kind of output, my schedule is
whatever I want it to be. (laughs)
We're an online only publication,
so we don't have print deadlines.
I'm just wrapping up a story now
that I've been working on for two months,
which is a luxury we don't often have in journalism anymore,
but I like it 'cause I like to write long,
I like to write slow.
I'm a magazine girl through and through.
So I am really into social justice issues,
so I find whatever it is.
I've written on mass incarceration, food access,
racism in the church, racism in the community,
and I find the nuns who are doing ministries in that.
I've also, you know, written the one-off stories
about nuns doing cool things like a 74-year-old nun
who lives in the Arctic Circle doing a ministry there
with the native community because
that's what she wanted to do after her retirement.
A lot of the times I do pick my own topics.
I like to consider those my passion projects.
I do about three a year because I take
a little bit longer to work on those,
but I do also do breaking nun news, it does happen,
so we've got right now some nuns,
the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Pennsylvania,
who are trying to stop a pipeline from being
installed in their land, so they've built a chapel
over the pathway, and so I'm constantly
chasing their court cases and their court appearances,
so I can write breaking news on what's happening
with the nuns' pipeline. (laughs)
So once I have an idea for a story, or it is assigned to me,
I get on the phone and I call, call, call, call, call.
I think one of the things I was surprised to learn
about journalism is that it's not a lot of
going in the field and you know, talking to people,
man on the street anymore.
It's a lot of sitting at your desk and calling people.
So I call lots of nuns, lots of institutions
that might be nun-adjacent, or at least
Catholic institutions, and then I find who I need to talk to
and I ask them all the relevant questions
or ask them who I need to talk to
if they're not the right person,
and I probably report, depending on the story,
for a month if it's one of the longer stories.
If it's a deadline story, I spend
an hour reporting and then I start writing.