What does The Objective do?

After the summer of 2020, a slew of journalism organizations committed to change in terms of how they cover historically underrepresented communities, as well as how they treated and hired staff from those same communities.

But their failures were not new. We’ve heard it time and time again: journalism organizations making public statements denouncing the treatment of historically underrepresented communities. Those same organizations committing to change how they cover and treat staff from those communities. And then… nothing.

Despite holding themselves up as “objective” and “impartial” for generations, mainstream American newsrooms have almost always been defined by homogenous teams that fail to account for race, gender, class, disability, and sexuality.

We founded The Objective in June of 2020 as a volunteer collective of journalists concerned with systems of inequity in newsrooms. Our small newsroom relies on donations to hold journalism institutions accountable and advocate for journalism that’s understanding of power dynamics and intersections of identity.

Your donation goes to paying our contributors equitably and ensuring we can continue to publish independent reporting and media criticism.

We publish reporting, media criticism, and Q&As with the goal of building collective and narrative power for communities (and journalists) that have been misrepresented or dismissed in order to change the way journalism is practiced in the U.S.

To us this means two things:

1. An expanding number of media reporters and critics, primarily from demographics historically marginalized by the journalism field, are visible to the journalism field. Beyond that, we want all journalists to feel more comfortable offering public, fair, and well intentioned feedback to the newsrooms they work for and read.
2. People historically marginalized, distorted, and misquoted have a forum to read about and express their own concerns about journalism’s production in the U.S.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

To promote civic information, we need to measure it

By Kang-Xing Jin

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Commentary

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December 19, 2024

The new Civic Information Needs Census exists thanks to the understanding that measuring information needs is critical for those creating civic information.

Lewis Raven Wallace joins The Objective’s advisory board

By The Objective

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The Objective

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December 17, 2024

Reintroducing The Objective’s advisory board members and a chance to win Wallace’s book, The View from Somewhere.

Q&A: Communities Beyond Elections

By James Salanga

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News

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December 13, 2024

Da’Shaun Harrison and Lara Witt, both involved in co-founding the Movement Media Alliance, spoke about movement journalism, decentering politicians, and what it would take for newsrooms to shift their election coverage.