There’s been a lot of talk lately about the difficulties our industry faces. Newsrooms across the country have been steadily cutting staff over the past several years as both readership and advertising revenue have declined.
This has been a tough trend for mainstream local newsrooms that employ anywhere from 20 to 50 journalists with corporate backing and large sales teams. It’s even more threatening to news organizations that serve communities of color, whose teams were already much smaller. In fact, traditionally, publications serving communities of color are often owned and operated by one person or a family running on little more than passion. It’s been hard for those small outlets – outlets like ours – to survive, much less grow.
In the face of this trend, though, I have some good news.
When we launched six and a half years ago, we could count on one hand the number of people of color in Madison who were regularly paid to work in journalism. Since then, we’ve offered paid opportunities for 59 journalists of color – including freelancers, contract writers and interns – and launched careers of journalists who’ve gone on to outlets like Wisconsin Public Radio, Capital Times, NBC News, Kansas City Star and CNN.
And, to be frank, we’ve done that on a shoestring. We’re a small nonprofit newsroom, as you know, running on the support of our community as well as a few foundations and partners who believe in our mission. We’ve never had anything near the resources of our friends in legacy media, and while we’ve found a way to pay journalists of color and launch those careers, we’ve never been able to create full-time staff jobs for those journalists.
Until now.
Thanks to you – our community, our partners, our supporters – we are hiring two more full-time journalists as well as a full-time summer intern. One of the new hires will be based in Madison, a much-needed addition to the team there. The other will cover communities of color in Green Bay and the Fox Valley. We will pay a competitive salary and offer benefits like health insurance and 401(k).
I wanted to share this news for two reasons.
First, if you are a journalist who wants to focus on communities of color, or a journalist of color looking for the right opportunity, we want to talk to you. Beyond the salary and benefits, if you join our team, you’ll find a positive and supportive environment where you’ll be able to tell the stories you want to tell, from your unique point of view, in the context of a professional newsroom. You won’t be fighting for your pitches. No editor will say “I’m not sure that’s a story” about the issue you know is important. Nobody will say or imply that you’re “too biased” to cover your own community; rather, we appreciate that you can bring both your professionalism and authentic experience to add depth and nuance to those stories.
If that’s you – or if that’s someone you know – please reach out! The best way to do that is to email us at [email protected], though you can also DM us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Second, for everyone else reading this, I want to say thank you. One of our hopes when we launched in 2015 was not only to diversify the Madison press corps but to create real jobs in media for young people of color. While we’ve been fortunate enough to pay all of those freelancers, interns and contributors well, creating full-time staff positions has always been the dream. And now, we both realize that dream and look ahead to our next chapters – more on that in the coming weeks. For now, though, rest assured: we are doing important work for our communities of color, and we will soon be doing more, thanks to your support.
