Top
Navigation
2015 Online Commentary, Large Newsroom finalist

Susie Cagle and Al Jazeera America Online Community

 

Finalist(s)
Susie Cagle

Organization
Al Jazeera America Digital

Award
Online Commentary, Large Newsroom

Program
2015

Entry Links
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

View Entry
About the Project

An Oakland, California-based journalist and cartoonist, Susie Cagle brilliantly combines muckraking reporting with graphic illustrations to produce social commentary that engages online readers on multiple levels. While her art is humane and compassionate, her text is hard-hitting and brimming with facts. Think Doonesbury meets Wayne Barrett.

In the first of these three pieces, Cagle takes up the rise of the tech industry in San Francisco and the contentious issues of wealth, class and labor rights that it has generated. In “To get a fair share, sharing-economy workers must unionize,” Cagle examines how new “sharing economy” startups such as Uber and Taskrabbit exploit their “partners” (i.e. employees) to make a buck in the growing digital-driven peer-to-peer economic model.

Her second piece, “How San Francisco sold a majority stake to tech,” is a reported cartoon that launches from a news story on how Dropbox and Airbnb workers tried to kick out kids from their public neighborhood soccer field, insisting they had paid $27 to reserve it with the city online. It covers all the ways that San Francisco has sold out the public’s interests to support and subsidize the tech industry, from Twitter holiday parties at Civic Center to waiving fines for Google and Apple private buses.

In her third piece, “Privatized busing comes to San Francisco,” Cagle examines new private bus start-ups Leap and Chariot and how they compare with the city’s public SF Muni buses. For 2-3 times the cost, you can get WiFi, coconut water, reclaimed wood and free yourself of the hassle of waiting for wheelchair-bound riders to come aboard. Don’t miss the GIF cartoon in which Cagle compares the median incomes of Leap and Chariot bus routes with those of the most impacted SF Muni routes.