A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

“The notion that one can be completely without bias in their reporting is a nice idea until you realize what’s ‘objective’ is actually determined by what doesn’t rock a white, male, upper-class sensibility and worldview.”

If your news organization was on thin ice at the start of 2020, it probably didn’t survive to 2021, the great destroyer of local newspapers, the Black press, fledgling digital sites, and the continued consolidation of smaller, weaker organizations swallowed up by media behemoths. Basically, in 2020, the brakes stopped working, and we were a runaway semi-truck heading into a wall of disruption.

2020 revealed weaknesses everywhere — in financial models that brought entire companies near death, in the loss of in-real-life events like the iconic Essence Festival, or rocked by their decades-long lack of diversity and history of discrimination, revealed in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the great “awakening” in the white mainstream on the plight of African Americans.

In 2021, we’re bound to see even more. More restructuring. More losses. More reckonings. More disruption. But out of all this turmoil, I do see one bright light — the end of the journalistic myth of “objectivity,” forcing a much needed refocusing on fact-finding and telling the truth.

The notion that one can be completely without bias in their reporting is a nice idea until you realize what’s “objective” is actually determined by what doesn’t rock a white, male, upper-class sensibility and worldview. Many police departments and police unions have always been biased or intentionally misleading in their view of the “subjects” they interact with, but for most of my life — until 2020 and the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by local police — most newsrooms took what police said as gospel, largely unquestioning their version of events during deadly encounters with African Americans.

Compounding this realization, that “objectivity” came with its own biases, was the fall of the Trump administration and its “anti-truth” reality. Trump forced the media to let go of the “bothsidesism” that plagued it for generations and rededicate itself to reporting the truth, sticking to the facts, and questioning everything.

While this same administration relentlessly attacked the press for simply doing its job, this dire situation revealed how important a free press is in a fledgling democracy — which is what America has always been, considering it was an autocratic, democracy-for-some apartheid state for most of its history, with an enslaved and later segregated and oppressed black and indigenous underclass. Trump’s actions unintentionally revitalized and energized the fourth estate, giving it a clarity of purpose in a year of desperation, plague, and government-sponsored chaos.

Maybe things will calm down after the inauguration of President-elect Biden; somehow covering the White House under Trump was both a marathon and a sprint for the beleaguered press. But just as you can’t unring a bell, you can’t magically undo what transpired in this country in 2020, rocked by a failed pandemic response, economic uncertainty, a negligent and antagonistic president, and police brutality. We will be contending with what happened in 2020 for a generation, as this was the year that ended any notions of American innocence or feelings of invincibility, and begets our hopeful, but fragile and uncertain future.

Danielle C. Belton is editor in chief of The Root.

If your news organization was on thin ice at the start of 2020, it probably didn’t survive to 2021, the great destroyer of local newspapers, the Black press, fledgling digital sites, and the continued consolidation of smaller, weaker organizations swallowed up by media behemoths. Basically, in 2020, the brakes stopped working, and we were a runaway semi-truck heading into a wall of disruption.

2020 revealed weaknesses everywhere — in financial models that brought entire companies near death, in the loss of in-real-life events like the iconic Essence Festival, or rocked by their decades-long lack of diversity and history of discrimination, revealed in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the great “awakening” in the white mainstream on the plight of African Americans.

In 2021, we’re bound to see even more. More restructuring. More losses. More reckonings. More disruption. But out of all this turmoil, I do see one bright light — the end of the journalistic myth of “objectivity,” forcing a much needed refocusing on fact-finding and telling the truth.

The notion that one can be completely without bias in their reporting is a nice idea until you realize what’s “objective” is actually determined by what doesn’t rock a white, male, upper-class sensibility and worldview. Many police departments and police unions have always been biased or intentionally misleading in their view of the “subjects” they interact with, but for most of my life — until 2020 and the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by local police — most newsrooms took what police said as gospel, largely unquestioning their version of events during deadly encounters with African Americans.

Compounding this realization, that “objectivity” came with its own biases, was the fall of the Trump administration and its “anti-truth” reality. Trump forced the media to let go of the “bothsidesism” that plagued it for generations and rededicate itself to reporting the truth, sticking to the facts, and questioning everything.

While this same administration relentlessly attacked the press for simply doing its job, this dire situation revealed how important a free press is in a fledgling democracy — which is what America has always been, considering it was an autocratic, democracy-for-some apartheid state for most of its history, with an enslaved and later segregated and oppressed black and indigenous underclass. Trump’s actions unintentionally revitalized and energized the fourth estate, giving it a clarity of purpose in a year of desperation, plague, and government-sponsored chaos.

Maybe things will calm down after the inauguration of President-elect Biden; somehow covering the White House under Trump was both a marathon and a sprint for the beleaguered press. But just as you can’t unring a bell, you can’t magically undo what transpired in this country in 2020, rocked by a failed pandemic response, economic uncertainty, a negligent and antagonistic president, and police brutality. We will be contending with what happened in 2020 for a generation, as this was the year that ended any notions of American innocence or feelings of invincibility, and begets our hopeful, but fragile and uncertain future.

Danielle C. Belton is editor in chief of The Root.

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Nik Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Cory Haik   Be essential

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

AX Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships