Advance Local shutters Reckon News
The newsroom’s closure is just the latest event highlighting the hypocrisy of journalism leaders’ promises around the 2020 “racial reckoning.”
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Reckon News is shutting down and laying off 11 staffers.
The newsroom, born in the U.S. South, focused on reckonings in the U.S. (with a particular focus on climate justice, reproductive rights, queerness and trans rights, Blackness, racial justice, and movements through the lens of marginalized communities’ perspectives). Started in 2017 as an outgrowth of Alabama-based AL.com, Reckon then shifted to regional coverage of the Deep South and expanded to national news in 2022.
A note to newsletter subscribers was sent out Thursday. The newsroom’s Black Joy vertical and newsletter will continue as part of New Jersey Advance Media, along with two Reckon employees.
Advance Local has not issued a public-facing statement about the newsroom closure, which workers learned about via internal email from the CEO. Reckon previously laid off 10 employees in Feb. 2024 due to budget cuts, the majority of whom were Black.
While the Black Joy vertical is kept alive, the newsroom’s shutdown reflects a growing deprioritization of reporting prefaced on intersectional lived experiences of race, class, sexuality, and more. Last summer, CNN disbanded its Race and Equity team, laying off one staffer and reassigning two others.
Newsrooms are becoming less diverse as leaders fail to support the journalists they hired during the “racial reckoning.” As Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier writes for the Local Media Association, not only are Black journalists being laid off, but they’re quitting because of on-the-job racism.
Corquet-Lesaulnier recalls the 2022 Washington Post Guild report highlighting that 1 out of 3 Black staffers in the newsroom quit willingly. The union’s Black caucus also interviewed over 30 former and current Black Post workers, who cited a lack of representation in leadership and constant questioning of their work’s credibility and legitimacy.
Reckon’s shutdown is also bad news for fair, nuanced, and respectful coverage of trans stories, which are sorely lacking in mainstream publications. While anti-trans legislation continues to rise, the publication invested in a dedicated LGBTQ+ reporter who focused on right-wing rhetoric, legislation seeking to ban gender-affirming care, critique of the Biden administration, and the connections between LGBTQ+ justice and Palestinian solidarity with a focus on the Midwest and South.
“As one of the very few trans women of color covering LGBTQ politics at a national level—especially rampant anti-trans legislation, I stand by my work with a great deal of reverence,” Denny, Reckon’s former LGBTQ+ reporter, wrote on X.
The shutdown of Reckon just a week into 2025 is just the latest installment in a pattern demonstrating a (perhaps predictable) decline in institutions truly fulfilling their commitments to the communities they suddenly purported to care for in 2020. This stands to further harm existing coverage, because the disparities and needs the so-called “reckoning” highlighted continue to persist — and are poised to be exacerbated by the incoming presidential administration.
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times.
This piece was edited by Omar Rashad.
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