Lauren Chapman

Anti-LGBTQ+ policies

I started covering Indiana's anti-LGBTQ+ policies in 2022. Our education reporter at the time had left for another opportunity. And she had passed the baton to me to cover Indiana's ban on transgender girls playing girls school-based sports.

During the 2023 legislative session, Indiana — like many states — proposed a slate of anti-LGBTQ+ measures. I covered Indiana's gender-affirming care ban for transgender youth and the lawsuits that followed. 

After the legislative session ended, I wanted to explain why these measures had been proposed. By and large, the answer was a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision: Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. 

Flashforward to 2025 and I’m breaking news on anti-transgender policies enacted in Indiana. My job as a reporter for Indiana Public Broadcasting was designed to be a stop-gap. I could cover just about anything as a warm body when one of the beat reporters was pulled to something else. But this is a topic that I built expertise, community trust and a well-resourced rolodex to find the nuance in policy.

---

COVID-19 resources, misinformation

My newsroom’s long-time health reporter left the team for a different job in December 2019. We had hired a contract reporter for the legislative session, but that contract was set to run out in May. 

When Indiana announced its first COVID-19 cases, I was with that contract health reporter, helping her navigate the uncharted territory. When Indiana announced its first COVID-19 deaths, I wrote the story. I built resources on COVID-19, Indiana’s Stay-At-Home orders and the state’s vaccine rollout.

As Indiana reached new grim milestones — more than 25,000 dead from the virus, millions of confirmed infections — I volunteered to report on it. 

And as misinformation started to sprout up, I wanted to address it responsibly. I found ways to help epidemiologists break down some of the more complicated aspects of COVID-19 without being unapproachable. I advocated for Facebook Live conversations about the data and the available science.

But of all the work that I’m really proud of (and some of the work I’d redo, given the chance), it’s a flowchart that tops the list. I worked with our then-education reporter on a story about the changing guidance for when students should and shouldn’t be in classrooms. The bulleted list wasn’t the most intuitive read. And at my core, I believe most things should be flowcharts. We put it together and I embedded a printable version within the story. And then I really didn’t think about it.

About a month later, during an interview with the health institute helping the state with gathering virus data, the director said that flowchart had been shared with everyone staffing the state’s COVID-19 hotline. It became a resource as parents tried to figure out if their kids were safe returning to school after winter break. She said it helped answer thousands of questions.

---

Faith and policy

I really, really enjoy reporting on the intersection of faith and policy. I find it infinitely fascinating: The different ways people connect their religious doctrine with their representative government. 

After covering a few protests by an organization called Faith In Indiana, I started to recognize a pattern that had been replicated by a few other groups. While demonstrations organized by religious conservatives — usually evangelical Christians — was very common, the burgeoning religious left's coalition building had been underreported.

This was my second NPR feature and remains one of my favorite stories.

Legislative session resources

Trying to follow a state’s legislative session is hard. It’s hard when you’re paid to do it. It’s infinitely harder if you’re just a person who cares enough about representative democracy to try and stay engaged. 

I wanted to find ways to make it a little easier. I’ve maintained an explainer for Indiana’s legislative session for the last nine years. It’s the narrative version of how the process works, along with some frequently asked questions. 

But not everyone wants to read the long version. And after hearing from members of our audience and advocates, I made a printable PDF version that tries to winnow down to the most important bits without losing any of the essence.

---

Civically, Indiana workshops

Civically, Indiana is a project that I wouldn’t have been bold enough to dream about when I was first getting started in journalism. And so, the workshop series inspired by the project is just icing on the cake. 

The workshop series is designed to bring together lawmakers, advocates and community members to discuss how to help people better engage in the process. People who work and cover the Statehouse know that the legislative session starts basically the first business day after Sine Die. But that’s not common knowledge, nor do most people know that there are topics to advocate for or against that early. 

The Civically, Indiana workshop series was designed to help. I created packets from community-responsive reporting to help arm attendees with resources to engage in the process. We did a presentation on how the legislative session works at the beginning of the workshop. And at the end, we help make sure attendees connect with their state lawmaker and begin to build a relationship with them.

---

The Indiana Two-Way

The Indiana Two-Way is an SMS text group. We send out headlines and solicit questions to inform future reporting. And we build a relationship with nearly 2,000 people in Indiana, responding to their questions, gathering their feedback and humanizing journalism. 

I’ve only managed the Indiana Two-Way for the last two years. And I’ve been humbled by the experience. 

There are a lot of characters in that group. Folks who respond every week with the latest conspiracy theory. Folks who want to pick a fight. Folks who just respond with a thumbs-up. I’ve developed these strange, parasocial relationships with people who care enough to try and be informed. And weirdly enough, I think this is the experience that I find myself turning back to over and over again as what has made me a better journalist. 

It’s reaffirmed that sometimes, the best way to build trust is to make them feel like they’re heard.

---

What is gender-affirming care?

Leading up to Indiana’s 2023 legislative session, I did a series of what we call “listening sessions.” They’re on background conversations to help inform future reporting. We knew lawmakers were planning on introducing a slate of anti-LGBTQ+ measures. And while I am a gay woman, I knew my experiences weren’t the same as every LGBTQ+ person in Indiana. 

I spoke to transgender advocates, I spoke to gender-affirming care providers, I spoke to organizations that represented Black, Indigenous and other LGBTQ+ people of color. And I spoke to older transgender Hoosiers. 

And what I heard over and over again was, gender-affirming care is scary because there aren’t a lot of resources out there that explain what it is. 

So, I put together an explainer. 

The kindest thing I’ve ever heard about my reporting came from this story. One of the transgender adults I spoke to said, “Kudos to [Lauren Chapman] for this amazing piece. I got a little teary … not because it needs a trigger warning, but because I’m so unused to seeing news pieces about the medical care that saved my life that don’t trade in poorly sourced rumor and speculation.”

Civically, Indiana

Civically, Indiana is a project that I wouldn’t have been bold enough to dream about when I was first getting started in journalism. 

It’s simple enough: Lower the barrier to entry for people to engage with state government and elections. 

The novelty of the project is how we did it. We asked. We collected thousands of questions between 2019 and the launch of the project in 2023. We answered the simple questions and the more complex questions. 

I built a dozen digital resources including FAQs, explainer graphics, printable resources and even an Oregon Trail-style game. I built the microsite and prioritized directing traffic back to our station partners. 

I co-managed the project from May 2023 to August 2024. After that, I managed the project by myself, working with reporters to add new stories.

---

Media literacy project

Volunteering to be bullied by high school government students is honestly kind of on brand for me, I won’t lie. Through a grant from Indiana Humanities, we developed resources for government and social studies teachers to teach bias and misinformation. 

During the 2023-24 school year, our team launched a pilot project of presentations to primarily high school social studies and government classes. We presented on bias, fact-checking, and how news teams work and function. Some presentations also integrated information on the First Amendment, how stories can change after publication, how culture influences news, and how journalists negotiate language and sensationalism.

---

Blood, Lead & Soil: A Year In East Chicago

In July 2016, residents in East Chicago learned of lead and arsenic contamination in the West Calumet neighborhood. Over the next year, people who lived in a public housing complex on the Superfund site were forcibly relocated, students at Carrie Gosch Elementary School were moved to an empty middle school and residents began the long, relentless process of advocating for themselves in the Environmental Protection Agency’s remediation process. 

The Indiana Public Broadcasting team put together an hour-long radio special in July 2017. I built the microsite, edited the videos and did the health reporting for the project.

---

Bill trackers

One of the ways I’ve sought to make following Indiana’s legislative session a little bit easier is by creating a bill tracker. 

Bill trackers aren’t all that complicated, right? Build a site, connect it to Indiana’s API, you’ve got a bill tracker. 

But I wanted to make everything a little more accessible for Hoosiers trying to follow along. The 2023 bill tracker had a number of features: status updates, searchable database and links to previous reporting, the bill’s page and assigned committees.

That first bill tracker won the Edward R. Murrow Award Region 7 Excellence in Innovation. I maintained bill trackers for the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions.

Illustration

My health reporter came to me with a problem. They needed primary art for a story one year into Indiana’s near-total abortion ban. But linking the sources in the story could be potentially dangerous. 

When coming up with an idea, we worked together. They kept pointing back to a concept highlighted in their feature: providers said Indiana's law makes patients' health care more difficult when "the legislature of the state of Indiana" is also in the exam room.

I grew up a huge comic book nerd and read Golden Age Batman comics like bedtime stories. Early in our discussion, I couldn’t help imagining an Adam West Batman-style “KA-POW” crashing into an exam room. 

After a lot of back and forth, we still ended up with an illustration that doesn’t trivialize anyone’s beliefs on abortion. But it captures that frustration.

---

School referenda calculators

School funding is complicated in Indiana. One mechanism schools districts have are school referendums. But helping people understand exactly how much those referendums would affect them gets a little complicated. 

So, I did some math. 

And then I made a calculator. The formula isn’t super complicated. But the referenda calculators are a really good example of something I bring to all of my work. Sometimes, I don’t know exactly how a project will work out. Sometimes, I work best when I’m just figuring it out. 

And sometimes, that’s a calculator.

---

Executive government explainers

One of my favorite civic literacy projects is this executive government explainer. Why did Indiana have a state treasurer and a state auditor? What’s the difference between those two jobs? Other than overseeing the Senate (kind of), what does the lieutenant governor do? 

I dug into Indiana law to pull out definitions and created a lightweight graphic to explain some of those complicated answers.

---

Whiteboard explainers

I'm a visual learner. I tend to be able to make sense of topics when I have the ability to sketch out ideas. And even when making motion graphics, it's often easiest for me to sit down, squiggle some arrows and figure out what I want long before I fire up After Effects.

RSA Animate videos had long since reached the peak of their popularity, but some of the most complex issues are just easier to explain with visuals.

I've included the full playlist of all my whiteboard explainers — I'm the only person who ever did the animation for them. And over time, they get better and better.

But the most interesting part of these videos are their staying power. One of the first videos I ever made "Why does erosion happen?" has been viewed more than 5,000 times. A video explaining how yoga can affect your brain has been viewed more than 30,000 times. Neither of these videos were in stories that performed particularly well — there's just staying power than transcends the many, many shifts in digital video consumption trends over the last decade.

I’ve always enjoyed photojournalism and as an unofficial protest reporter, it felt like the most respectful thing I could offer people who cared enough to show up with signs, banners and bullhorns to make their opinions known. 

This is a small collection of the thousands of images I’ve collected over the last decade. I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest stories in Indiana.

Can you survive Indiana's legislative session?: The game

How do you make state government a little more fun? That’s a daunting task in and of itself. Policy reporting requires a lot of nuance and context. And even the audience who desperately wants to understand how the process works has significant barriers to getting there. 

So, I made it a game. 

I modeled the visual style of the game as an homage to the 1990 version of the Oregon Trail game. When a bill dies in the Indiana Statehouse, it dies of dysentery as it floats to a recycling bin. The 8-bit visuals and smooth animations she illustrated capture the attention of users as they learn about the legislative process.

But it’s not all style. As the audience plays the game, they can interact with additional details about committee chairs and how to testify along with links to the community-responsive reporting from the IPB News team. And when their bill dies or is signed by the governor, players have access to printable one-sheets recounting the steps and more resources on how to connect with state government.

---

Copy-and-paste source diversity tracker

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, I heard over and over again from news directors and journalists that “our work speaks for itself.” That phrase bothered me. I knew that my own experiences informed the stories I chose to cover, the people I spoke to, even the quotes I selected. 

More and more, I grew frustrated that maybe — as journalists — we really didn’t fully understand what our work was saying. But as a team with an extremely limited budget, many source tracking options were financially out of reach. And back then, some of those resources cost tens of thousands of dollars.

So, I built one. 

I created a simple tool to make source tracking more accessible for newsrooms of all sizes. The copy-and-paste source tracker uses Google tools to allow for flexibility with some fairly simple spreadsheet formulas.

---

This News Is So Gay

Sometimes, a series of events starts with “Meet The Press, but like, gayer” and ends with you recording a podcast episode that includes a weird love letter to your home state. 

Reaching communities where they are sometimes means being the “unofficial Sportsball” correspondent for a weekly queer news podcast that doesn’t take itself too seriously. There is such a long and storied history of journalism actively oppressing LGBTQ+ people across the world. Joining “This News Is So Gay,” spearheaded by queer media juggernauts was a no-brainer. 

I didn’t come out until November 2016. And all along the way, I’ve found small ways to celebrate the community that has given me so much.

---

Indiana Week In Review

I’m not really the kind of person who loves being on camera. Speaking in front of an audience? Let’s do it. I love public speaking. But television really made my skin crawl. 

So, I volunteered to do it. When something makes me scared, I have a tendency to throw myself into it more. I’ve hosted Indiana Week In Review a dozen times. I’ve hosted live election night specials and post-State of the State analysis shows. 

Admittedly, TV still makes my skin crawl a little bit. But there’s something profoundly fun about throwing myself into something that makes me a little bit scared, and doing it anyway.