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What does The Objective do?

After the summer of 2020, a slew of journalism organizations committed to change in terms of how they cover historically underrepresented communities, as well as how they treated and hired staff from those same communities.

But their failures were not new. We’ve heard it time and time again: journalism organizations making public statements denouncing the treatment of historically underrepresented communities. Those same organizations committing to change how they cover and treat staff from those communities. And then… nothing.

Despite holding themselves up as “objective” and “impartial” for generations, mainstream American newsrooms have almost always been defined by homogenous teams that fail to account for race, gender, class, disability, and sexuality.

We founded The Objective in June of 2020 as a volunteer collective of journalists concerned with systems of inequity in newsrooms. Our small newsroom relies on donations to hold journalism institutions accountable and advocate for journalism that’s understanding of power dynamics and intersections of identity.

Your donation goes to paying our contributors equitably and ensuring we can continue to publish independent reporting and media criticism.

We publish reporting, media criticism, and Q&As with the goal of building collective and narrative power for communities (and journalists) that have been misrepresented or dismissed in order to change the way journalism is practiced in the U.S.

To us this means two things:

1. An expanding number of media reporters and critics, primarily from demographics historically marginalized by the journalism field, are visible to the journalism field. Beyond that, we want all journalists to feel more comfortable offering public, fair, and well intentioned feedback to the newsrooms they work for and read.
2. People historically marginalized, distorted, and misquoted have a forum to read about and express their own concerns about journalism’s production in the U.S.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

It’s healthy for student journalists to raise concerns about AI

By Emma Bainbridge

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Commentary

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March 6, 2026

Generative AI isn’t a real solution to the issues facing newsrooms. Students are right to point that out.

Fort Worth Report could become Texas’s sixth unionized newsroom

By James Salanga

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News

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March 6, 2026

The Fort Worth Reporters Guild will vote on unionization next week after management decided not to voluntarily recognize the union.

When The Baltimore Sun can’t get journalists to lower their standards, it turns to generative AI

By Madisyn Parisi

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News

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February 25, 2026

The Baltimore Sun ”once again disparaged … human reporters and their work” by publishing two AI-generated political analyses, the newspaper’s union said.