Award-winning independent journalist, Mel Buer

Last month, at the 68th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, I won an award for my reporting on last year's MacArthur Park raid in Los Angeles. It's an honor, truly. I do find it somewhat hilarious, however, that I won an award for a social media thread on a platform that, at the time, I was suspended from, for reporting that I didn’t get paid for even though it ended up on national news, in a city I couldn't afford anymore. As my colleagues sent me photos of the award sitting on the table, I was rushing to pack the last of my apartment into storage so I could spend my final days in LA with friends before heading off to live with family in the New Mexico desert. Life's little ironies.

To say I had complex feelings about receiving that award would be an understatement. The award is for reporting on an event that I would call a pretty dark day in Los Angeles, at the height of last year's devastating ICE raids. Neighbors rushed into their homes and businesses with looks of terror on their faces. The mayor showed up to a crowd of angry constituents screaming "Why have you abandoned us?" over and over. Federal agents swept their automatic weapons over civilians and trampled the soccer pitch with horses. Civilians were maced by retreating agents after they finished their photo op, and my face ended up in an ICE recruitment ad after the fact. All in all, it was a horrible day to be an Angeleno.

The question I've continually asked myself is–did that reporting even have an impact? Or did my social media thread simply capture a fucked up moment and make it to the national outlets first? In the grand scheme, did it even matter at all?

So much of my commitment to journalism centers around telling stories that matter–to the people I cover, and to the communities in which they belong. Did my short thread on the raid do any of that? I don't know, frankly. Why, in all of the submissions I sent to the LA Press Club (yes, I sent in my own nominations for award consideration. This industry won't recognize you unless you make them look), why was this one chosen? My other submissions felt stronger. All unanswerable questions, and I'm not sure it would make things clearer if I knew the answers anyway.

Now that I've left Los Angeles (not for good, I hope), and given myself some distance from the last year of reporting on protests, immigration, violence, organizing, I feel as though I've slammed headfirst into a wall. I've experienced a lot of traumatic events, both vicariously and firsthand, in the last 18 months. From the Jan 2025 wildfires, to the raids in Los Angeles and Ventura County, to the numerous run-ins with DHS and LAPD, and the constant threat of eviction and abject poverty over all of it...I'm feeling a little frayed these days.

How to square all this with the deeply-felt conviction that it's worth it to tell these stories, no matter the cost? Hard to tell. I know I'm not the only independent journalist struggling through the onslaught of horror in the news cycle these days. I've written about this before, but the journalism industry is in free fall, and many of us are doing what we can to keep our heads above water while we navigate a failed industry and devote our time to covering stories like these. Journalists love to lean on the 'first draft of history' cliche, but it fits–people deserve to see their names and faces in that first draft and someone's gotta be the one to write it down to begin with. What happens if you can no longer afford to live stably (not even comfortably) in the pursuit of this? Lord only knows, because I don't.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who sent me congratulations and who has supported this work over the last couple years (and to Bluesky who banned me and then gave me a blue check three days later lmao). Hard to say where I'll end up by the end of this year, but I hope wherever it is, I can still keep telling stories that are important to someone.

I'll leave you with a few photos from the last couple weeks.