Nina Shapiro
Staff reporter
Staff reporter
Nina Shapiro is a Seattle Times reporter who writes widely about social issues. Specializing in long-form, deeply reported pieces, she has covered the impact of changing federal policies on immigrants, COVID-19’s toll among Latinos, the legacy of tough-on-crime sentences, and the foster care system’s effect on poor, Black and Native American families. She previously worked as a senior writer at Seattle Weekly, and for publications in New York, New Jersey and southern Africa. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the C.B. Blethen Memorial Award and numerous other local and national honors. She is working on a project about the digital divide in the age of COVID -- a time that much of the world has gone remote.
It’s a bigger problem than you think, as the pandemic made clear.
In many tribal and rural parts of the state, even on the fringes of cities including Seattle, Spokane and Leavenworth, it’s often difficult or impossible to connect to the online world.
Colville tribal leaders aren't waiting on corporate America. When it comes to providing broadband, "nobody else is going to do it," said Damon Day, the Colville Reservation’s chief information officer.
While city residents turned to Zoom, Amazon and Netlifx during COVID-19, the digital divide has left many residents of a Washington state tribal reservation shut out of "normal life."