What do marginalized journalists need to pursue investigations?

Attendees of the Global International Journalism Conference 2008 congregate. Front and center is Al Jazeera journalist Sami Al-Hajj, a Sudanese man, shaking hands with a hijabi journalist. — Al Jazeera journalist Sami Al-Hajj shakes hands with an attendee at the 2008 Global International Journalism Conference. Photo from Kristine Lowe via Flickr.

It’s no secret that our industry has long had issues empowering journalists from underrepresented backgrounds, especially when it comes to producing long-form journalism. I myself had to leave a job, apply for fellowships, and raise my own money to afford myself the opportunity to spend a year on one story.

This experience led me to wonder: What do journalists from underrepresented communities need to work on and complete investigative, long-form projects?

When Lauren Grandestaff, the IRE resource center director, asked me to find a way to listen to journalists whom we hear from the least, I worked with IRE’s diversity and inclusion committee to find answers to that very question. We decided to find these answers through a needs assessment, which evaluates the current well-being and needs of a community through surveys or structured interviews with pivotal community members. Its purpose is twofold: to document the findings and to act based on them.

This article marks the first time we’re sharing some of our findings from our interviews with leaders across several organizations serving journalists across marginalized groups with the public.

Those organizations are the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA), the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), Institute for Independent Journalists (IIJ), the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA), the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), Trans Journalists Association (TJA), and the Pulitzer Center.

Below, you’ll hear what journalists represented by these institutions are looking for to thrive in the industry.

A sense of belonging

In many ways, journalists from underrepresented backgrounds have been yearning for peer support from people who have a similar background and similar experiences to them. Most institutions featured in the needs report have seen rapid growth in their membership in the past five to ten years, with new organizations often adding hundreds of members within a few years of inception.

For instance, within one year of shifting to a more formal membership structure, TJA has brought together 300 members. Since resuming operations in 2019 after a years-long hiatus, AMEJA has seen a “surge of hundreds” of people wanting to be part of the organization.

Long-established organizations have grown, too. NABJ has grown from 3,000 to close to 4,000 members. “We’ve broken records,” said Walter Smith Randolph, vice president of broadcast at NABJ.

“Our membership has gotten younger, and our biggest sector has been Gen Z and millennials,” he said.

AAJA’s membership has also expanded, said Nicole Dungca, its board president.

“I feel like people looked for more connections during the [start of the] pandemic and we were privileged to be able to provide that community,” she said.

The growth of these institutions stands in contrast to the stagnation or decline of membership in other, more general organizations. The Society of Professional Journalists, for example, saw its membership shrink by half in the past 10 years, according to Poynter. In the last six years, IRE’s membership has shrunken by roughly 20%. While the organization was able to recruit some 600 members through membership drives in the last year, its current membership of about 4,900 journalists (as of May 2024) is still below IRE’s pre-pandemic peak in 2019, when the organization had over 6,100 members.

External organizations serving underrepresented journalists also provide reporters editorial and emotional support they do not get from their employer or editors.

This can include fellowships, scholarships, and mentorship programs tailored to their lived experiences. More importantly, many institutions, including AAJA, NABJ, and NAHJ, made it a point to support their membership throughout various chapters of their career, from student programs, to mid-career training, to leadership mentoring.

“This moment calls for us to be very dynamic on how we’ve understood expertise in journalism, as well as the opportunities we may get,” said Adam Rhodes, a board member of TJA. “The old markers of prestige and legacy fall away when it [comes to] people’s lived experiences. People’s lived experiences have value, something legacy media still needs to understand.”

More representation at the top

Some of the main issues brought up by a number of interviewees were related to the lack of representation in newsrooms, especially in mid-career and managerial positions.

For example, multiple journalists from underrepresented backgrounds told us this translated to an adverse work environment: They were not adequately supported to do their work or had to fight to have editors recognize the importance of stories from their communities.

The lack of diversity in leadership also means that reporters are not given the chance to do investigative reporting, Smith Randolph said.

“We’re not given opportunit[ies]. Investigators at IRE are white [and] male. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, and we don’t see ourselves,” he added. “You need to target black journalists, specifically LGBTQ journalists, Hispanic, and Spanish-speaking journalists.”

As the journalism industry faces major challenges, including closures of entire organizations and layoffs, these issues compound for many reporters, who may become so frustrated that they leave the industry altogether.

Former AMEJA board member Karen Zraick noted that some of the group’s members felt they were “not able to voice their concerns in their newsrooms” or feared “being taken off of stories” because of their background or connections to the region.

News coverage of the Israel-Palestine war has also caused some of AMEJA’s members to question whether they should stay in journalism. The organization republished a guide for more accurate reporting shortly after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 last year, and has urged newsrooms to consider broader historical context about the decades-long conflict — including that, per international law, Israel is occupying Palestinian land.

“A lot of people are getting really upset with journalistic institutions and the way that the story is being handled,” Zraick said. “I think right now, the main challenge is keeping these journalists working in journalism, and not giving up on the entire industry due to their disenchantment … It’s a crisis time.”

More funding

Almost every interviewee mentioned finances and resources as a reason journalists from their organizations struggled to do long-form investigative work.

For full-time employees of news organizations, this manifests in not getting any funding or time to do investigative work. For freelancers, this might mean not having the financial support to start a long-term investigation. Interviewees said a healthy dose of seed funding or, in the case of full-time employees, time and helpful resources like money for FOIA fees could go a long way with getting long-form stories off the ground.

“Funding those early-stage projects is really important for freelancers to do meaningful work,” said Katherine Reynolds Lewis, founder and chief executive officer of the IIJ. The organization focuses on independent journalists of color, but also serves the wider public.

One of their most popular programs, she added, has been a freelance course that teaches journalists the business of being an independent journalist.

“We work with a lot of people who don’t have intergenerational wealth,” Lewis said. “When we did our survey of 500 journalists, the biggest need was business know-how on how to pay your bills.”

When it comes to training, Mónica Rhor, former NAHJ Student Project lead, said there are “two bridges” in a journalist’s career when training could make a crucial difference.

One bridge is needed when reporters have been working about 2 to 3 years of experience: “That’s when they’ve gotten [their] feet wet, but are still interested in investigative reporting and feel they will never get there,” she said.

Rhor said the second phase during which reporters need more support would be about 10 to 15 years into their career.

“There are some fellowships for those reporters, but reporters who have not published a formal investigation by that point are often shut off from investigative reporting jobs,” she said. “That is unfair, because though they haven’t published a traditional investigation, they have flexed investigative reporting muscles on their beats.”

Better working conditions and protections from employers

While not everyone mentioned these issues, it is noteworthy that organizations working with international journalists also spoke of increasingly hostile work environments, in terms of political climate surrounding press, as one reason keeping journalists from doing hard-hitting investigative work.

Issues, like high security risks in the form of government surveillance or legal prosecution of reporters, can vary from region to region, said Emilia Díaz-Struck, executive director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN). The group gathered more than 2,100 journalists from more than 130 countries and territories in its last Global Investigative Journalism Conference in 2023.

She also said that GIJN has community members who have had to leave their country and go into exile.

Boyoung Lim, a senior editor at the Pulitzer Center, also mentioned that many of the reporters who receive grants from the organization may face political prosecution from repressive regimes.

She said that one Kashmiri journalist whom the Pulitzer Center supported was imprisoned for his work and only released after close to 2 years. The experience shook him, but he still wants to do good work. Her former newsroom in Korea was also raided several times because the newsroom did investigations against prosecutors.

“Politically, with the rise of authoritarianism, it’s become more and more difficult to produce investigative journalism,” said Lim. “I can’t say it’s happening all across the board, but it comes in different forms in different countries.”

Having institutional support when facing these issues can be crucial for journalists to dig into difficult stories.

A path forward

Looking at these testimonials provides multiple concrete pathways for organizations to better support journalists from underrepresented backgrounds. For instance, the diversity and inclusion committee sent several recommendations to the board and staff of IRE: it could be useful for IRE and other organizations to jointly raise funds to seed-fund investigative projects.

Another idea was to provide much more community-specific support to journalists from underrepresented backgrounds by partnering with institutions who already have the trust of their communities, like NABJ or AAJA. This could include training more diverse editorial leaders and providing opportunities and support to mid-career journalists.

This article is an abbreviated version of the full needs assessment IRE’s Diversity and Inclusion committee submitted to the board and staff of the organization. Alejandra Cancino, Dianna Hunt, and Hayat Norimine contributed reporting to this needs assessment.

Update, Aug. 5, 2024: This story has been updated to include the correct order of Emilia Díaz-Struck’s last name and clarification on GIJN’s span.

Lam Thuy Vo is an investigative reporter working with Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities, and an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a journalist at The Markup, BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money.

This story was edited by James Salanga.