Journalism is increasingly pushing reporters of color out of the industry

When I left the newsroom in 2023, I did not yet see the scope of what I would face as a freelancer.

At the time, I knew freelancing would offer me flexibility to write more of the arts criticism I loved after spending years as one of the only writers of color in a legacy business newsroom. It also offered some reprieve from the exhaustion of constantly having to justify stories about underrepresented communities to editors who often saw them as marginal, niche, or irrelevant.

But I failed to anticipate the pressure of patching together income from $300 story rates that did not cover New York rent, editing college application essays, doing book publicity, and taking whatever adjacent work could keep me solvent.

Eventually, I left journalism for full-time communications work in 2024. 

In hindsight, my own exit was part of a broader change in the industry. Newsroom jobs have been shrinking for more than a decade, but the last few years have sharpened disparities among the most affected by industry instability, especially for journalists of color, who only represent 24% of the field as of 2022, despite their efforts to shift newsroom culture toward reporting that accurately captures the nuances of community dynamics. 

A 2024 survey by the Institute for Independent Journalists (IIJ) found that layoffs disproportionately affected women, journalists of color, and younger professionals. Journalists of color made up 42% percent of respondents who had experienced layoffs or buyouts since 2022, despite representing just 24% of the labor force.  

Katherine Reynolds Lewis founded the IIJ, which supports the emotional and financial sustainability of freelancers of color. She told The Objective that her organization is hearing an increase in freelancers urgently seeking resources and tools for making a living independently.

“The last year has been dramatically more turbulent and precarious for all journalists, but especially journalists of color, disabled journalists, and others who are more likely to be pushed out of newsrooms,” she said. In 2022, about 34% of journalists surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they were freelance or self-employed. 

More journalists of color, she added, are turning to freelancing not as a glamorous act of independence, bu because “newsroom jobs either are nonexistent or so competitive that they feel it’s useless to apply.”

Moving out of journalism staff jobs: “A choice and a necessity”

In 2020, Carla Murphy, a journalism strategist, educator, and media organizer with News Futures, conducted the “Leavers Survey” for OpenNews, surveying 101 former journalists of color to gather data and anecdotes on why they left the industry. The most common reason respondents cited for leaving was workplace stress, followed by low pay and newsroom management.

“I felt like my talents were ignored or sidelined in favor of clearly less talented or qualified non-Black journalists, routinely,” one Black and Latine journalist surveyed said. “I rarely got the support or mentorship needed to thrive … and it left me deeply disheartened that in the upper echelons of journalism, diversity can often equate to tokenism.”

For many journalists without the backing of big-name newsrooms or a financial cushion, freelancing has morphed into a reluctant adaptation to an industry where staff jobs are increasingly scarce and hard to secure.

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Lewis also sees the pressures reflected in the Leavers survey as signs that journalists need to be equipped for careers that may no longer follow a traditional staff job path.

“Every single journalist must be prepared for a phase of their career to be entrepreneurial or freelance,” she said. “People need the knowledge and tools to make a living as freelancers, solo creators, and journalism entrepreneurs.”

In response, IIJ is trying to build “a more stable on-ramp” to an independent journalism career through free guides, webinars, and low-cost business training, but Lewis says demand outpaces what small support systems can provide.

Many journalists enter the field to report, write, edit, and tell stories, but are increasingly expected to become their own business managers, brand strategists, grant writers, accountants, publicists, and audience development teams just to remain hireable. For journalists of color, these entrepreneurial tasks further complicate working in a predominantly white industry and also raise another question: Do they want to do all that? Kelly Carrion knows that feeling intimately, describing the years since 2020 as a period of profound disillusionment.

“I always say the pandemic caused the beginning of the downfall of my journalism career,” the former veteran TV news producer said. 

Working in breaking news meant “constantly looking at death and chaos,” she said, adding that the accumulation of secondary trauma took a serious toll on her mental health. “As much as I loved telling stories, I realized that I had strayed so far away from my real purpose in life, which is to help people.”

Now, Carrion runs her own career coaching business and works in higher education. Even when she had strong editors advocating for her, she said, the broader culture of television news remained punishingly competitive, rewarding overwork and self-erasure in the name of advancement.

“I think my shift was a combination of both a choice and a necessity,” she said. “As a journalist of color, I always felt like I had to be better than the person next to me. I had to fight harder for the stories I wanted to tell.” 

Attacks on equal rights, press freedom heighten dangers for journalists of color

News organizations have faced increased political and economic strain since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. Newsrooms have had to contend with shrinking budgets as the administration enacts backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and the legitimacy of journalism itself.

Larry Goldbetter, president of the National Writers Union, said, “The media industry is under attack with right-wing oligarchs consolidating the industry at a dizzying pace, and tens of thousands of journalism jobs have been eliminated over the past few years.”

“On top of that, journalists have been targeted around the world, with hundreds killed in Gaza in the past four years and many more arrested and injured for trying to do their jobs,” he added. 

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Five U.S. press freedom groups launched the Journalist Assistance Network last year to provide more access to immigration, legal, and safety resources, with Committee to Protect Journalists’ CEO Jodie Ginsberg saying, “Journalists and newsrooms from across the country are increasingly concerned about a raft of measures and actions that threaten press freedom in the United States.” 

“Tens of thousands of journalism jobs have been eliminated over the past few years,” Goldbetter said. Last year, employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported over 17,000 job cuts in the media industry, up 15% from 2024.

Those concerns can be especially acute both personally and professionally for journalists covering attacks on equal rights policies under the second Trump administration — for example, migrant reporters, particularly Latine reporters, have faced heightened concerns around ICE activity and immigration enforcement, pushing some newsrooms to develop safety plans to better protect reporters and sources. 

And while journalism may still publicly celebrate diversity, it increasingly leaves journalists of color to absorb the consequences of economic and political instability without recognizing their contributions to the field, building on patterns the 2020 Leavers Survey already highlighted. 

In the survey, Murphy said she prioritized qualitative — rather than quantitative — responses from journalists of color to better understand not just who was leaving, but how they felt at work, what responsibilities they were assigned, and why many no longer saw a future in the industry. 

That was also, she said, because the industry’s recurring focus on retaining journalists of color collapses diversity into monolithic racial categories such as “Asian” or “Black” that obscure the different pressures journalists face across specific ethnicities, classes, immigration status, geography, and newsroom access. 

Her point was to “see” journalists of color, not simply take their headcounts.

“Well before 2026, we needed to ask questions about the survival of the field, not just the survival of jobs,” Murphy said. “What is the point of job retention if the field itself no longer exists?”

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Update, June 4: The story has been updated to reflect proper hyphenage of Katherine Reynolds Lewis’s name.

Xintian Tina Wang is an award-winning NYC-based arts and culture journalist and documentarian whose work appears in TIME, HuffPost, NBC News, VICE, ELLE, Teen Vogue, ARTNews, Brooklyn Rail, Art Newspaper, and more. As the president of the Asian American Journalists Association New York Chapter, she leads programs advancing media equity.

This story was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.