Jem Bartholomew is an award-winning freelance reporter, with a focus on narrative nonfiction stories about poverty and social exclusion.


Portrait by Sophie Davidson ©

Jem Bartholomew is an award-winning freelance reporter, with a focus on narrative nonfiction stories about poverty and social exclusion.


Portrait by Sophie Davidson ©


Selected Reporting

Extracts from ‘BROKE: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis’ (Biteback, 2023)

Chapter one — Uprooted: no place like home (London Review Bookshop)
Chapter eight — Atomised, but not alone: work and resistance in the gig economy
 (Prospect Magazine)


Profiles
Frank Tunbridge: searching for the black leopards of Gloucestershire (The Economist’s 1843 Magazine)
Fabrizio Romano: the most famous journalist in the world (Columbia Journalism Review)
Marvin Rees: the improbable rise of Britain’s first elected Black mayor (The Washington Monthly)
John Pring and the tragic deaths the British press is reluctant to cover (Columbia Journalism Review) 


Magazine Features
The food bank paradox (Prospect Magazine)
Room at the inn: inside the UK's asylum seeker hotel scheme (New Humanist Magazine)
‘Everyone’s gagging for it’ – How Britain got high on nitrous oxide (The Guardian’s Saturday Magazine)
A good death: how pressure is mounting to legalise assisted dying (New Humanist Magazine)
The rise of the truth industry (New Humanist Magazine)
‘Disinformation weekly’: how midterm newspapers are failing the US electorate (Tow/Columbia Journalism Review)


News Features
‘Living in fear’: the renters in England facing two-month ‘no fault’ evictions (The Guardian)
Giving birth in a bunker in Kyiv: ‘I said to him you’re a new Ukrainian’ (The Guardian) 
‘Cost of children crisis’: UK parents on coping with half-term on a shoestring (The Guardian)
‘Insulting’: how inadequate fuel support may force couriers out of work (The Guardian)
Excluded from Covid support: How one missed deadline made a man homeless (The Big Issue Magazine)
‘Cold and callous’: The Uber Eats algorithm is sacking people automatically (The Big Issue Magazine)
‘People have lost faith’: life in former mining towns 40 years on from strike (The Guardian, with Clea Skopeliti)


Talk of the Town-Style Features
Tate Modern director: I hope there’s not going to be a ‘Hindsbo period’ (Prospect Magazine)
London Underground commissioner Andy Byford: “Our job is to make the political masters look good” (Prospect Magazine)
FareShare CEO Lindsay Boswell: “I’m never happier than when there’s a crisis” (Prospect Magazine)
Raspberries for Cauliflower? The Bizarre World of Online Grocery Store Substitutions (The Wall Street Journal, Front-Page)
After the Covid Vaccine, People Find Joy in Little Things (The Wall Street Journal, Front-Page)
Empty Soccer Stadiums Drop Commentators in Hot Water (New York Magazine)


Investigative Stories
Confined benefits: The pension schemes propping up private prisons (Financial Times’ Pensions Expert Magazine)
Revealed: Just one in four Trump-endorsed candidates using Truth Social actively (Tow/Columbia Journalism Review)
How the media is covering ChatGPT (Tow/Columbia Journalism Review, with Dhrumil Mehta)
Trouble in Wyoming (Tow/Columbia Journalism Review, with Dhrumil Mehta)


Essays and Reviews
Boots Made For Watching (Oxford Review of Books)
The Ghost That Haunts Our Press (Oxford Review of Books)
Review of Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures (New Humanist Magazine) 
Review of Rebecca Smith’s Rural (New Humanist Magazine)


Q&As for Columbia Journalism Review
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka on his ‘cultural investigations’ 
TIME’s Billy Perrigo on uncovering the labor exploitation powering AI 
The Guardian’s Jim Waterson on the UK media’s role in choosing the next PM 
The Kyiv Independent CEO Daryna Shevchenko on a newsroom in wartime

NYT’s Andy Newman on the death of Jordan Neely and covering homelessness in New York City 
How can newsrooms better serve communities of color? 


Media Appearances
Environmental disinformation is getting weirder (Outside/IN podcast, NPR New Hampshire)
Q&A: Jem Bartholomew on Britain’s ‘cost of living crisis’ and the press (Columbia Journalism Review)
Despite Vaccines, COVID Is Here to Stay and We Must Learn to Live With It (Daily Dive podcast)
Diversifying the industry (XCity Magazine)
Manufacturing Consensus book launch with Samuel Woolley (Strand Bookshop, New York City)
Does the class ceiling still exist? (Creative Access panel)






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