The year journalism starts paying reparations
“Reparative journalism is explicit in its commitment to doing the work of racial justice, and by extension without apology social justice.”
This is not a prediction about 2021 as much as it is a call for what must come in the “after” we’ve all been waiting for some of us longer than others.
After 45. After the pandemic. After the uprisings.
Now that this consequential year has definitively denuded the unsustainability of American institutions as we know them, the work of reparations can begin. Specifically, the work of reparative journalism.
Reparative journalism1 is the term I use to describe a specific approach to newsmaking that centers structural vulnerability as its core value. It is the framework I envision for the news media to redeem itself by reconstructing our shared reality through radically inclusive editorial choices.