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It’s been a tough week to be not just a journalist, but also a marginalized person living in the U.S. I hope everyone has been able to be with community this week as they’re processing the emotions that accompany the election.
This week, I wanted to round up some of The Objective’s past coverage offering a lens through which to cover both what’s to come and what’s unfolding right now. I understand feeling stuck, scared, and defeated, and still, I also wanted to make space for looking forward — particularly when it comes to rectifying mistakes journalism has made in covering the rise of fascism and the growth of grassroots movements resisting it.
In this issue:
📙 Recapping Objective pieces about context and community-building
📰 New York Times Tech Guild workers go on strike
And also: Press freedom organizations brace for Trump’s presidency, analyzing how mainstream media failed to properly understand the so-called “Latino vote”, presidential candidates’ stances on Palestine factoring into L.A. Times owner’s decision to not endorse, and The Washington Post sends its workers back to office 5 days a week.
—James Salanga
RACE, GENDER
Recapping Objective pieces providing context, suggestions for looking ahead
Over the past four years, The Objective has published work that both critiques journalism from a lens of power inequity and lays out ways it can do better. Facing another Trump presidency, here are some pieces that provide context for how we got here and highlight the kind of reporting and infrastructural support that will be crucial moving forward.
Context:
“The troubling framework of the Neo-Nazi’s girlfriend”: Journalist Alina Kim calls out the pitfalls with news coverage reducing and minimizing women’s active participation in far-right extremism.
“As transgender America struggles, national news doesn’t know what to write”: Assigned Media founder Evan Urquhart argues for national news to consider better trans coverage imperative.
Community-building:
“Solidarity reporting can help the cause of public safety for marginalized communities”: Journalism professor Anita Varma lays out the principles of solidarity reporting as a way to emphasize community cohesion and long-term significance.
“What would it take to empower journalists of color to do investigative work?”: Investigative reporter Lam Thuy Vo’s recap of a recent Investigative Reporters and Editors assessment provides ways newsrooms can provide infrastructural support as investigative journalism remains sorely needed.
“Legislation is nice, but freelance media workers can achieve more through collective action”: Journalism professor and IWW member James Anderson highlights the importance of community action in pushing for more freelance protections.
“We need a media ecosystem that urges justice”: Cierra Brown Hinton’s piece for our Civic Media Series clarifies the necessity of shifting narratives and editorial frames toward a more just world.
Your support makes this work possible — we’d love if you shared these stories and asked a friend to subscribe to this newsletter. Or chip in to help us keep publishing pieces like this! We appreciate it.
—James Salanga
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LABOR, INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
New York Times Guild goes on strike during election week
The digital picket line: No NYT Games and NYT Cooking app. The strike comes amid broader calls to boycott the Times at large for its coverage of Israel’s bombardment of Palestine. Read more.
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WHAT ELSE?
A bit more media
Press freedom organizations brace for Trump presidency: Given the incoming president’s track record of being vehemently anti-press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has called on legislators and President Joe Biden to sign the the bipartisan PRESS Act to stop Trump from surveilling and imprisoning journalists. Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders asks Trump to take several actions to amend his relationship with the press, including taking action on global press freedom cases.
🗞️ Read the Freedom of the Press Foundation press release and the Reporters Without Borders story.
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The mainstream media misunderstood Latino voters once again: Fernanda Camarena covers the missteps of mainstream media in collapsing Latino perspectives into a monolith and outlines some ways journalists can do better, urging them to look to social media — where most Latino audiences are today. “It’s about breaking down local, personal issues and real-life concerns that communities face every day,” she writes, suggesting journalists dig into the nuances of the Latino communities around them instead of generalizing only to Mexican-origin Latinos.
⎯⎯
In internal email, LA Times owner cites Gaza among reasons for his non-endorsement: The email corroborates Nika Soon-Shiong’s claim that the candidates’ stances on Israel and Palestine were among the reasons her father pulled a Times endorsement. “But how do we ignore the counter issues of the innocents being killed now ? Do we accept that indeed genocide is happening and that we stand as a country of willing arms suppliers and yet remain silent?” Soon-Shiong wrote.
⎯⎯
Washington Post eliminates hybrid workweek, tells workers day after election: “Congrats on finishing election coverage! Now back to the office.” That’s not the gist of publisher Will Lewis’s email to Post employees the morning after Election Day, but it might as well have been. All managers are mandated back to the office five days a week by February 2025 and all other workers within commuting distance by June 2025. The newsroom union hasn’t yet issued a statement on the new edict.
JOURNALISM IN A GRAF
Quote of the week
“We need … to imagine a media that is less aloof and elitist; the answer is precisely not high-level elite signaling, aimed at an imagined centrist reader.”
FINALLY…
Resource of the week
This week’s resource is the Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide.
As anti-trans legislation mounts and could possibly grow, accurate and thoughtful coverage of trans communities and their experiences is crucial.
This stylebook is a tool offering advice on common terminology and editorial frames that don’t replicate the harms journalists have already enacted when covering trans people. There’s also further reading for more information on deepening your understanding and coverage of trans stories.
For more style guides, journalism job boards, and tip sheets, check out The Objective’s resource list.
Thanks for reading. We appreciate you being here, and we’ll have more for you soon.
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