Hasbrouck Heights, NJ: Earthquakes continue to rock New Jersey at an alarming rate and with shocking severity. As of August 12, the Garden State has reportedly experienced 26 earthquakes. New Jersey’s biggest earthquake of 2025 occurred near Hasbrouck Heights late Saturday, August 2, with a magnitude of 3.0. 

This is the first installment from the 2025 Citizen Journalism class: a photo essay by Shriaditi Kancherla titled “An afternoon at Johnson Park”. In this series, Kancherla captures both the activity and the serenity of the park. 

Piscataway, NJ - Johnson Park lands at the crossroads of urban sprawl, where populated towns Piscataway, Highland Park, and New Brunswick fade into acres of trees and the scent of grass. 

New Brunswick, NJ - On August 20th, the New Brunswick city council held a hearing regarding the fatal shooting of 68-year-old Deborah Terrell. Her death reaffirms the urgent discussion about racialization of police killings, police accountability, and the predominant killing of Black and Brown people experiencing a mental health crisis. 

Police officers shot Terrell on Friday, August 8th, while responding to an emergency call reporting a woman walking around with a knife in her apartment building. Terrell was a beloved mother, grandmother, and member of the New Brunswick community. Many people who knew Terrell shared their memories of her and sent their condolences to her family online.

Trenton, NJ - New Jersey prides itself as the “Garden State.” Yet the paradox is stark: while family farms harvest peaches, tomatoes, kale, and corn, schoolchildren in lower-income districts still miss out on the local gifts of the Garden State at lunchtime. Simultaneously, small and mid-sized growers say they need steadier, closer-to-home buyers to make ends meet.

Food inequity in New Jersey can be highlighted by data estimates that in 2022, almost 262,000 children lived in food-insecure households. Those numbers jumped alongside inflation as pandemic support unwound. In turn, for many school-age children, the lunch line is often the surest path to a fresh and healthy meal. 

New Hanover Township, NJ - New Jersey may become an even bigger hub for the Trump Administration’s immigration plans, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced plans to set up a temporary detention center at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurt in Burlington and Ocean Counties. 
Established in 2009, this 42,000-acre facility is the only tri-service joint base in the Department of Defense. Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters that there are 60,000 beds available at the base, and their goal is to raise the number to 100,000 as they turned it into a holding facility.

They are everybody's children

Newark, NJ - I’ve been struggling to understand how, for almost 2 years, politicians and mainstream media outlets have managed to keep up the charade that there wasn’t a genocide occurring in Gaza. 

Even beyond the usual taboos and the early and loose declarations of anti-Semitism, politicians still felt comfortable backing up their votes to send even more bombs to Israel.

Newark, NJ - Fresh off the release of Apple Cider - A Parable of Black Love, Newark filmmaker Opoku “OpotheBoat” Boateng has returned with a new short film, Return to Nature. This upcoming project is based on a poem of the same name by Brooklyn writer Warren Edwards, a security officer at the Guggenheim Museum and the founder of the arts and entertainment company, Create Matter.

New York City, NY: Zohran Mamdani’s overwhelming support in the New York City mayoral primary has reignited the fight over policy, ideology, and identity within the Democratic Party. 

Before election results started rolling in, some other “Democrats” had already joined right-wing reactionaries to run wall-to-wall ads decrying that Mamdani would abolish the New York City Police Department (NYPD), single-handedly kill every Jew in the city, and levy increased corporate taxes. Interestingly, they also characterized him as inexperienced and incapable of accomplishing anything at all.  

Newark, NJ - Iranians living in New Jersey, who make up a reported 0.08% of the state’s population, continue to grapple with Iran’s most recent military encounter with Israel and the U.S. This particular skirmish began on June 13, when Israel launched attacks on nuclear and military facilities in Iran. Both countries engaged in direct conflict with each other until Israel and Iran reached a ceasefire on June 24. The Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that, as of June 23, Israel's missile strikes killed a confirmed 974 people in Iran and injured 3,458 others.