Hopefully pissed off
A divestment in infrastructure is always a divestment in people. I wrote this in the notebook I carry with me like a security blanket these days. It is my consistent partner while navigating life as a 2025 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford and post my work at Outlier Media in my hometown of Detroit.
It still feels strange to refer to the work of Outlier in the past tense. The strangeness is not regret; it was time for me to shift away and make room for the next chapter of the newsroom’s evolution, of this I am assured but Outlier became an appendage. This news operation that started as a one-woman project with my business partner and friend for life, Sarah Alvarez, was now a fully formed operation against all odds. When I think of the early days of my time at Outlier, it reminds me of the friends who had babies you couldn’t put down. Velcro babies, they call them. They wanted to be held, and they’d let you know that putting them down was not an option, as they would scream at the mere thought of leaving your side.
Nonprofit news startups operate very similarly. They require a kind of attention, and holding that over time will take over your life, especially if they aren’t well-resourced. Thanks in part to our perceived success at Outlier, but chiefly because I am very concerned about the toll of startups on the lives of their teams, I spent a significant amount of time talking to and coaching the folks beginning their startup journey.
In our industry, many people theorize about building newsrooms, and many helped us grow Outlier from a sponsored project to a self-contained and thriving non-profit. There is no replacement for doing, however. The weight of that responsibility sits with you always, like a baby on your hip. I will be thanking many people for the rest of my days for their interest and investment in seeing both Outlier and its two leaders succeed. The support we received was invaluable, which is one reason I felt the need to coach formally and informally. “To whom much is given, much is required” is my personal North Star. I knew and know that these newsroom leaders, building on the fire-tinged land of an industry and nation on fire, often can’t say aloud what keeps them up at night. It’s a club where the entry fee is often too high for people with the least to lose but the courage to build something useful. So they build.
There was a time in which it seemed impossible for us to make Outlier more than a two person crusade, it was the folks who refused to let us give up on ourselves that kept us morally afloat. In our very early days, I had been waiting for a couple of months for a large check from a foundation. As I continued to work on other revenue lines, this check was the most valuable. It was caught in the bureaucracy of a foundation’s systems, as is so much of the nonprofit world. This was a time when Sarah and I were already alternating who would get paid because often there wasn’t enough money to pay us both at the same time and keep our SMS news service operating, one reporter, and other bills paid. We chose to do this because we both believed fully that what we were doing was worth the personal sacrifice. We were building a news service not led by our personal business interests or to enhance our reputations but as an obligation to use journalism to address broken systems and help our community members survive and thrive. Our communities need reliable information. This is one of the main reasons why I do this work, but it should be intolerable to make such personal sacrifices for an industry meant to serve as a public good. It is certainly not sustainable.
After the murder of George Floyd, Outlier’s financial future changed. I still carry a strange guilt in my belly for the months that proceeded that time. A guilt that is not mine to hold. Suddenly, I found myself sitting on Zooms, looking into the eyes of foundation leaders, some of whom had doubted our value, trying to help them understand the value of investing in journalism that serves the under-resourced and the underserved. A kind of journalism that business models don’t lead, but by the necessity of its existence in addressing and repairing harm. Week after week in the summer of 2020, I sat in my home office, professionally begging foundations to find value in the very people who raised me and were the reason I was sitting there. Unlike me, many of them weren’t going to be invited to these tables, so I stood as our representative. I told another Black executive during this time that this was our window to build because guilt works, but it has the shelf life of milk. Guilt is a terrible business model.
What I sought for my neighbors, I also crave for the practitioners of our field; they might do their work, even the most challenging forms of this service, without sacrificing their dignity, health, and financial security. I know what it took for us to make Outlier work. I know the things those of us who are building newsrooms don’t tell funders, donors, or even ourselves about how, in the most challenging times, our small local newsrooms, often serving deeply resource-drained communities, are surviving: hopes, prayers, and the occasional payday loan, refinanced home mortgage and ever lessening commitment to personal health. In this way, we are mirrors of our reporting, inhabiting many of the same harms that we work to report on and repair. This is an unsustainable practice where the scales of our demise lie in the willpower of people unwilling or unable to stop, even if it brings them to their knees.
As I do for my beloved neighbors in Detroit, I want more for our industry, and that more sits in inconvenient truths and unconventional methods. I seek a kind of sustainability that isn’t predatory and doesn’t rely on underpaid, undervalued labor. I sincerely believe the health of our newsrooms and its practitioners is aligned with that of our communities. You can’t have healthy communities and sick newsrooms. Outlier was the beginning of this exploration for me. We created practices, pay scales, and policies that honored our team’s work and created more equity across the organization. It was worth the sacrifices, but we can do it without losing ourselves. That is where the focus of my time as a JSK Fellow at Stanford is being spent, learning from sectors outside of our own what might be possible when we decenter journalism and instead focus solely on building work that centers healthy communities, both in and out of our newsrooms.
“I love people who are hopefully pissed off” is another line from my notebook. I wrote that line while watching Rev. Dr. William Barber II deliver a talk in the unbelievably regal cathedral here at Stanford. Dr. Barber has spent his theological life in service to the poor by working to wake the collective up to this atrocity created and maintained like a well-oiled machine to keep the poor poor. I am no Dr. Barber, but from my seat in the cathedral, I felt seen, understood, and hopefully pissed off enough to keep searching for a way forward.
