As unprecedented numbers of marchers pounded the pavement to protest racist police violence in 2020, expressing outrage at the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, some of the most impactful and widely circulated news images were, rather counterintuitively, views from above.
City streets themselves became sites for the inscription of protesters’ central message: street murals reading BLACK LIVES MATTER were painted in cities across the U.S. and beyond. And although the first of these murals was instigated by a municipal government rather than by a crowd of marchers — D.C.’s Department of Public Works, not far from the White House — groups of volunteers in multiple cities swiftly emulated its example, painting the movement’s slogan on their streets and giving it a public presence far more expansive and durable than any cardboard sign.
Conspicuous in public space and, for the most part, collectively generated, these murals quickly became a potent icon of the mass movement that gave rise to them. Their production, visibility, and defacement soon became a story in its own right. And aerial photographs depicting them soon became a familiar feature of the protests’ press coverage.
Much of the strategic brilliance of the Black Lives Matter street murals lay in the way that they inverted the normal functions of aerial imagery. Views from above tend to render subjects on the ground small, unindividuated, and subject to potential surveillance; they tend to dehumanize. It’s no coincidence that the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has associated aerial views with the gaze of authority — an “authority to tell us to move on” and that “there’s nothing to see here”; an authority on which policing has traditionally rested. But when the streets themselves are emblazoned with a movement’s slogan, even the most detached, godlike photographs from above are forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Black lives.
Despite the unusual potency and impact of photographs from above in the coverage of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, the movement as a whole has actually helped to hasten a shift away from disembodied “views from nowhere.” Instead, 2020 has prompted a more profound acknowledgment of the fact that people who make news images — much like people who write news stories, and people who run newsrooms — are situated and partial.
As the protests forced news institutions to reckon with their own complicity in the day-to-day maintenance of white supremacy, two observations that photographers and journalists of color have been making for years were expressed with renewed urgency: first, that news institutions need to do more to make themselves genuinely representative of the diverse populations they serve; and second, that the ideal of objectivity is often practiced in a way that reinforces racial bias, upholding whiteness as an unspoken norm. In 2021 and beyond, news institutions will need to adapt to this political and epistemic reckoning.
In World Press Photo’s most recent State of News Photography report, published in 2018, questions about race and ethnicity seemed to rankle one respondent, who wished to discuss their profession without reference to race. “I don’t see any reason why you need to know if I am Black or white, yellow or green,” the respondent wrote, offering a trope that purportedly “colorblind” white people often recite.
But the statistics presented in the report made it abundantly clear why a frank discussion of race was needed. Among the news photographers who responded to World Press Photo’s large-scale survey, only 1.4 percent of them — a total of 14 people — were Black.
It is unsurprising, then, that many news institutions struggle to present nuanced depictions of Black lives. The visual journalist Tara Pixley, writing for Nieman Reports in 2017, reported seeing “a dearth of diverse perspectives” during her decade and a half working in several newsrooms: “When both photographers in the field and photo editors in the newsroom are primarily white and male, news images will reflect that singular perspective,” she wrote. Initiatives among photographers of color to redress this lack of representation — such as Diversify Photo, an organization that promotes the work of BIPOC photographers and offers a database intended to help editors incorporate diverse perspectives — have issued a challenge to the positioning of whiteness as a tacit norm, a default setting.
This is crucial work, because when whiteness operates as a default setting, calls for journalistic objectivity often have the effect of excluding, hemming in, or silencing people of color. In a rousing and important New York Times op-ed in June, the reporter Wesley Lowery observed that too frequently in newsrooms, “The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded, or robbed of new opportunities.”
A more morally sound and intellectually honest approach, Lowery wrote, would be for editors to “consider truly listening to” news workers of color and working to center the perspectives they offer. Editors would also do well, as Lowery and others have noted, to think carefully about whether their image of objective reporting is implicitly, invisibly calibrated to white readers. As the journalist Lewis Raven Wallace — whose book is aptly titled The View from Somewhere — asserted in a discussion with the Columbia Journalism Review, “The journalism we call objective is generally just biased towards accepted social and political norms.” If this is so — and I believe it is — then the “view from nowhere” that proponents of journalistic objectivity claim to offer is, in practice, usually a view from above: It is a perspective that issues from a position of authority but refuses to acknowledge its exclusionary status.
It is my hopeful prediction that in 2021, editors will make good-faith efforts to learn from 2020’s protests and eschew an illusory image of objectivity in favor of staffs and stories that better reflect the diversity of the world that surrounds them. If this happens, the slogans that occupied city streets will find new life in newsrooms — and journalism will be better for it.
Annie Rudd is an assistant professor in the department of communication, media, and film at the University of Calgary.
As unprecedented numbers of marchers pounded the pavement to protest racist police violence in 2020, expressing outrage at the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, some of the most impactful and widely circulated news images were, rather counterintuitively, views from above.
City streets themselves became sites for the inscription of protesters’ central message: street murals reading BLACK LIVES MATTER were painted in cities across the U.S. and beyond. And although the first of these murals was instigated by a municipal government rather than by a crowd of marchers — D.C.’s Department of Public Works, not far from the White House — groups of volunteers in multiple cities swiftly emulated its example, painting the movement’s slogan on their streets and giving it a public presence far more expansive and durable than any cardboard sign.
Conspicuous in public space and, for the most part, collectively generated, these murals quickly became a potent icon of the mass movement that gave rise to them. Their production, visibility, and defacement soon became a story in its own right. And aerial photographs depicting them soon became a familiar feature of the protests’ press coverage.
Much of the strategic brilliance of the Black Lives Matter street murals lay in the way that they inverted the normal functions of aerial imagery. Views from above tend to render subjects on the ground small, unindividuated, and subject to potential surveillance; they tend to dehumanize. It’s no coincidence that the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has associated aerial views with the gaze of authority — an “authority to tell us to move on” and that “there’s nothing to see here”; an authority on which policing has traditionally rested. But when the streets themselves are emblazoned with a movement’s slogan, even the most detached, godlike photographs from above are forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Black lives.
Despite the unusual potency and impact of photographs from above in the coverage of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, the movement as a whole has actually helped to hasten a shift away from disembodied “views from nowhere.” Instead, 2020 has prompted a more profound acknowledgment of the fact that people who make news images — much like people who write news stories, and people who run newsrooms — are situated and partial.
As the protests forced news institutions to reckon with their own complicity in the day-to-day maintenance of white supremacy, two observations that photographers and journalists of color have been making for years were expressed with renewed urgency: first, that news institutions need to do more to make themselves genuinely representative of the diverse populations they serve; and second, that the ideal of objectivity is often practiced in a way that reinforces racial bias, upholding whiteness as an unspoken norm. In 2021 and beyond, news institutions will need to adapt to this political and epistemic reckoning.
In World Press Photo’s most recent State of News Photography report, published in 2018, questions about race and ethnicity seemed to rankle one respondent, who wished to discuss their profession without reference to race. “I don’t see any reason why you need to know if I am Black or white, yellow or green,” the respondent wrote, offering a trope that purportedly “colorblind” white people often recite.
But the statistics presented in the report made it abundantly clear why a frank discussion of race was needed. Among the news photographers who responded to World Press Photo’s large-scale survey, only 1.4 percent of them — a total of 14 people — were Black.
It is unsurprising, then, that many news institutions struggle to present nuanced depictions of Black lives. The visual journalist Tara Pixley, writing for Nieman Reports in 2017, reported seeing “a dearth of diverse perspectives” during her decade and a half working in several newsrooms: “When both photographers in the field and photo editors in the newsroom are primarily white and male, news images will reflect that singular perspective,” she wrote. Initiatives among photographers of color to redress this lack of representation — such as Diversify Photo, an organization that promotes the work of BIPOC photographers and offers a database intended to help editors incorporate diverse perspectives — have issued a challenge to the positioning of whiteness as a tacit norm, a default setting.
This is crucial work, because when whiteness operates as a default setting, calls for journalistic objectivity often have the effect of excluding, hemming in, or silencing people of color. In a rousing and important New York Times op-ed in June, the reporter Wesley Lowery observed that too frequently in newsrooms, “The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded, or robbed of new opportunities.”
A more morally sound and intellectually honest approach, Lowery wrote, would be for editors to “consider truly listening to” news workers of color and working to center the perspectives they offer. Editors would also do well, as Lowery and others have noted, to think carefully about whether their image of objective reporting is implicitly, invisibly calibrated to white readers. As the journalist Lewis Raven Wallace — whose book is aptly titled The View from Somewhere — asserted in a discussion with the Columbia Journalism Review, “The journalism we call objective is generally just biased towards accepted social and political norms.” If this is so — and I believe it is — then the “view from nowhere” that proponents of journalistic objectivity claim to offer is, in practice, usually a view from above: It is a perspective that issues from a position of authority but refuses to acknowledge its exclusionary status.
It is my hopeful prediction that in 2021, editors will make good-faith efforts to learn from 2020’s protests and eschew an illusory image of objectivity in favor of staffs and stories that better reflect the diversity of the world that surrounds them. If this happens, the slogans that occupied city streets will find new life in newsrooms — and journalism will be better for it.
Annie Rudd is an assistant professor in the department of communication, media, and film at the University of Calgary.
Anna Nirmala Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots
Colleen Shalby The definition of good journalism shifts
Julia Angwin Show your (computational) work
Megan McCarthy Readers embrace a low-information diet
Rick Berke Virtual events are here to stay
Tanya Cordrey Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values
Burt Herman Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities
Loretta Chao Open up the profession
Jacqué Palmer The rise of the plain-text email newsletter
Nonny de la Pena News reaches the third dimension
Mark S. Luckie Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy
Sarah Stonbely Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity
Andrew Ramsammy Stop being polite and start getting real
Juleyka Lantigua The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned
Joni Deutsch Local arts and music make journalism more joyous
Cory Bergman The year after a thousand earthquakes
Kate Myers My son will join every Zoom call in our industry
Kerri Hoffman Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem
Nikki Usher Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media
Taylor Lorenz Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy
Anthony Nadler Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy
Chase Davis The year we look beyond The Story
Sonali Prasad Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise
Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui Millennials are ready to run things
Mike Ananny Toward better tech journalism
María Sánchez Díez Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok
José Zamora Walking the talk on diversity
Ståle Grut Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox
Bo Hee Kim Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture
J. Siguru Wahutu Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Stop pretending publishers are a united front
Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation
David Chavern Local video finally gets momentum
A.J. Bauer The year of MAGAcal thinking
Edward Roussel Tech companies get aggressive in local
Marie Shanahan Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo
Masuma Ahuja We’ll remember how interconnected our world is
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves
Amara Aguilar Journalism schools emphasize listening
Sue Cross A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save
Jennifer Brandel A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation
M. Scott Havens Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption
Eric Nuzum Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder
Gordon Crovitz Common law will finally apply to the Internet
Steve Henn Has independent podcasting peaked?
Cindy Royal J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability
Bill Adair The future of fact-checking is all about structured data
AX Mina 2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary
Chicas Poderosas More voices mean better information
Hossein Derakhshan Mass personalization of truth
Rishad Patel From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers
Logan Jaffe History as a reporting tool
Alyssa Zeisler Holistic medicine for journalism
Celeste Headlee The rise of radical newsroom transparency
Ernie Smith Entrepreneurship on rails
Marissa Evans Putting community trauma into context
Robert Hernandez Data and shame
Kristen Muller Engaged journalism scales
Laura E. Davis The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change
Tim Carmody Spotify will make big waves in video
Nicholas Jackson Blogging is back, but better
Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula Expect to see more translations and non-English content
Cherian George Enter the lamb warriors
Jesse Holcomb Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism
Linda Solomon Wood Canada steps up for journalism
Patrick Butler Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration
Talmon Joseph Smith The media rejects deficit hawkery
Whitney Phillips Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods
Pablo Boczkowski Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?
Hadjar Benmiloud Get representative, or die trying
Jeremy Gilbert Human-centered journalism
Tonya Mosley True equity means ownership
Mariano Blejman It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism
Jim Friedlich A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes A shift from conversation to action
Zizi Papacharissi The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth
Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin Media reparations now
Parker Molloy The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump
Danielle C. Belton A decimated media rededicates itself to truth
Brandy Zadrozny Misinformation fatigue sets in
John Garrett A surprisingly good year
Candis Callison Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)
Ben Collins We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists
Imaeyen Ibanga Journalism gets unmasked
Jody Brannon People won’t renew
Joanne McNeil Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism
Nico Gendron Ask your readers to help build your products
Sumi Aggarwal News literacy programs aren’t child’s play
Ashton Lattimore Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry
Zainab Khan From understanding to feeling
Samantha Ragland The year of journalists taking initiative
Sarah Marshall The year audiences need extra cheer
Ray Soto The news gets spatial
Don Day Business first, journalism second
Natalie Meade Journalism enters rehab
Ryan Kellett The bundle gets bundled
Mike Caulfield 2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)
Benjamin Toff Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse
Matt DeRienzo Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality
Ariel Zirulnick Local newsrooms question their paywalls
Meredith D. Clark The year journalism starts paying reparations
Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli Defund the crime beat
Ariane Bernard Going solo is still only a path for the few
John Saroff Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites
Nisha Chittal The year we stop pivoting
Raney Aronson-Rath To get past information divides, we need to understand them first
Mandy Jenkins You build trust by helping your readers
Renée Kaplan Falling in love with your subscription
Mark Stenberg The rise of the journalist-influencer
Joshua P. Darr Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis
Francesco Zaffarano The year we ask the audience what it needs
Richard Tofel Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)
Brian Moritz The year sports journalism changes for good
Pia Frey Building growth through tastemakers and their communities
Janet Haven and Sam Hinds Is this an AI newsroom?
Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund The virus ups data journalism’s game
Beena Raghavendran Journalism gets fused with art
Francesca Tripodi Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes
Andrew Donohue The rise of the democracy beat
Astead W. Herndon The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again
Errin Haines Let’s normalize women’s leadership
Charo Henríquez A new path to leadership
Garance Franke-Ruta Rebundling content, rebuilding connections
Victor Pickard The commercial era for local journalism is over
Delia Cai Subscriptions start working for the middle
David Skok A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, a push for pluralism
Sam Ford We’ll find better ways to archive our work
Kawandeep Virdee Goodbye, doomscroll
Kevin D. Grant Parachute journalism goes away for good
Annie Rudd Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”
Jer Thorp Fewer pixels, more cardboard
Nabiha Syed Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships
Jonas Kaiser Toward a wehrhafte journalism
John Davidow Reflect and repent
Doris Truong Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage
Rachel Schallom The rise of nonprofit journalism continues
Rodney Gibbs Zooming beyond talking heads
Marcus Mabry News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)
Christoph Mergerson Black Americans will demand more from journalism
Jessica Clark News becomes plural
Ben Werdmuller The web blooms again
Matt Skibinski Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it
Catalina Albeanu Publish less, listen more
Tamar Charney Public radio has a midlife crisis
Michael W. Wagner Fractured democracy, fractured journalism
Heidi Tworek A year of news mocktails
C.W. Anderson Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?
Aaron Foley Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news
Jennifer Choi What have we done for you lately?
John Ketchum More journalists of color become newsroom founders
Gonzalo del Peon Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side