Amsterdam News brings on Shannon Chaffers to report on gun violence

By HELINA SELEMON Blacklight Science Reporter

Upon getting the job at Amsterdam News, Report for America corps member Shannon Chaffers found a family connection to the paper.

“My grandmother and my grandfather are both from New York and my grandmother’s from Harlem,” Chaffers says. “Apparently, they used to get the Amsterdam News delivered to their apartment, according to my mom.”

“So that was a cool connection that I think gives me a little bit of a connection to the paper.”

Chaffers is deepening that connection as she joins the Amsterdam News’ Blacklight investigative team as its first gun violence reporter.

A Massachusetts native, Princeton graduate and Fulbright scholar, Shannon brings a passion for racial justice reporting to the burgeoning team.

“We are thrilled to have Shannon join The Blacklight and Amsterdam News family,” said The Blacklight’s founding editor Damaso Reyes. “She will add important reporting capacity to our Beyond the Barrel of the Gun reporting initiative and help us better serve our community by highlighting solutions to gun violence.”

Born and raised in the Wellesley suburb of Boston, she graduated from Princeton University in 2022 with a degree in sociology and certificates in journalism, African American studies and German. Her passion for journalism began in high school when she joined her school’s paper.

“When I was little, I would be writing stories with my twin sister and we just love[d] exploring the world, and writing about it in various ways,” Chaffers said. Joining her high school newspaper set her on the path to becoming a journalist. “Journalism is a cool way to combine my love of writing, and my general curiosity about the world,” she added.

She later sought out journalism classes at Princeton and joined the university paper, writing for and eventually editing the opinion section— an experience that she said helped her develop her voice and learn how to make a convincing argument. Her first journalism course was an investigative journalism class.

“That was my first introduction to… a different kind of journalism than I was used to,” she said. “It was inspiring to see that this was a type of journalism that I wanted to do.”

She recalls when then-Washington Post investigative reporter Kimbriell Kelly visited her class and talked about her project “Murder with Impunity.” With that project, Kelly was trying to expose how homicides, especially in Black communities, were going unsolved in Washington, D.C. Kelly’s work and the class propelled Chaffers to dive into local issues impacting people of color in New Jersey.

The combination of Amsterdam News’ legacy of unabashed and intrepid reporting, the mission driving The Blacklight, the paper’s new investigative unit, and Beyond the Barrel of the Gun, a three-year endeavor by the Amsterdam