Juana Summers is struck by “an incredible sense of responsibility.”

She took over one of the host chairs at “All Things Considered” in June 2022 after many years as a political correspondent for NPR. Now almost a year into her new role, she sees herself as a guide to making the news program — and NPR in general — a place where people can feel represented.

Part of that, Summers believes, starts with the audience knowing her.

“I am never setting at the door that I am a Black woman, I am a stepparent, I am a woman who grew up in the Midwest and lived in a low- and middle-income home growing up, and who went to private religious schools,” said Summers, 34. “All of those dynamics are things that inform how I do my journalism, and the degree in which I lean into any part of that varies from story to story.”

Summers is one of the four women of color — three of them Black — who have taken over hosting duties at flagship NPR programs over the past year. Leila Fadel moved to “Morning Edition” in January 2022, joined just over a year later by veteran NPR host Michel Martin. Ayesha Rascoe became the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday” in March 2022. Their roles extend beyond the voices delivering the headlines. Each are editorial leaders with immense influence over what and who is covered.

“It would seem that after NPR top executives and news managers saw its three most popular women of color hosts departed within the last year, they would have pondered seriously about why these stellar female journalists left, with serious determination to make progressive changes at the public network to recruit and retain women of color hosts,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on race and gender in broadcast journalism.

Bramlett-Solomon added that leadership at NPR now faces a unique challenge in showing their commitment “to move forward with dramatic and meaningful transformation in programming inclusion and not simply window dressing on the set.”

Whitney Maddox, who was hired for the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion manager role in January 2021, said that in her role, she has especially focused on women of color at NPR: “What’s happening with them? How are they doing? What do they need?”

She has created a monthly space for women of color at the organization to meet and share about their day-to-day experiences and voice what resources they need. Her work also includes consulting to the flagship programs and checking in on their workplace cultures and how people are supported, including how stories are pitched and edited.

Maddox also started Start Talking About Race, or STAR, which is a twice-monthly event open to everyone in the organization. From these conversations, Maddox said she’s already seen an impact.

“This is moving beyond this space into how people are pitching their stories,” Maddox said. “Editors have come back to me and said, ‘A point that somebody made in STAR — I used that when I brought up a point of how we should think differently about how to source this story.’ There is a process, there is time, there is changing people’s hearts and raising their consciousness to understand why this work is important.”

The leadership of Fadel, Martin, Rascoe, and Summers are key parts in acting on conversations surrounding equity. Their roles in the host chairs are a signal of NPR’s commitment to reflecting their audience, Marrapodi said. “Our job is to be public media for the entire public,” he said. “We’re here for everybody. Our job is to hold a mirror up to society. And this is what society looks like.”

Fadel, 41, is acutely aware that her in the host chair is a representation of what society looks — and sounds — like.

“I just never thought it could happen. Clearly women have held host seats at NPR long before me, and people of color have moved up through the organization, but I just never imagined it,” she said. “How could I have imagined this for myself? There was no one who looked like me, who was an Arab woman, who was Muslim, doing this job.”

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, constantly as she works. “I think about her and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

Even the sound of her voice has been true to Rascoe’s roots: As her executive producer Sarah Lucy Oliver said, “Ayesha sounds like herself. She says she sounds like a Black woman from Durham, North Carolina.”

Oliver described what she calls “NPR voice” — a low register, stripped of any regional dialects, that registers as white and male — as the prevailing sound of NPR. Rascoe, she said, is a disruption to that.

“For decades, listeners have been accustomed to a particular kind of NPR voice. You can run through the dial and figure out when you’ve landed on an NPR member station,” Oliver said.

Hearing a voice like Rascoe’s “is a definite change in direction, and is exactly the kind of voice NPR wants to bring to the air,” Oliver said. “This is part of the real world. People speak differently. People have different regional accents. People use different kinds of colloquialisms. NPR is trying to sound more like the real world now.”

But Rascoe has had to reckon with the way audiences — used to that staid, white, and masculine NPR voice — perceive her. She has received racist listener feedback: coded messaging urging her to “sound professional,” telling Rascoe about how they don’t like her voice.

Rascoe says this is “all just a way of saying, ‘You are Black, and you are a Black woman from the South, and therefore you are stupid.’” When she first arrived at NPR in 2018 from Reuters, where she was a White House correspondent, it was a shock. “I will not try to pretend that it didn’t hurt and that it wasn’t frustrating,” she said.

Though Rascoe said she has received nothing but support from her colleagues and managers, her experience speaks to the dynamic at play in newsrooms nationwide aspiring to evolve, change and grow in being representative in their journalism.

The work of “disrupting the whiteness that journalists of color so often feel in white newsrooms” is hard and real, Bramlett-Solomon said — but doable, especially when there is real, on-the-ground support from management, with actual dollars behind it to show it.

Rascoe is aware of the fact that by simply being on air in such a high-profile way, she is doing that work of not only changing NPR, but changing American audiences’ expectations more broadly on credibility within the news.

“I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine…Hopefully, it helps expand their idea of what authority, what professionalism and what intelligence can sound like,” Rascoe said.

Martin, 63, first joined NPR in 2006 to launch “Tell Me More,” an interview-focused show that aired on NPR member stations nationwide from 2007 to 2014. She then became host of “Weekend All Things Considered,” a position she held until joining “Morning Edition” as one of the hosts in March.

After decades in journalism, and many years at NPR specifically, Martin is deliberate and thoughtful in her imagining of the organization’s future and her role in it. As someone with a long history with the organization — one that includes using her voice to help push NPR forward on how it thinks about and covers race — she brings to her new role the ability to hold the past in the present while continuing to look forward. She said she’s constantly thinking not only about her time at NPR, but the ways journalists of color have worked to serve communities throughout history in how she approaches her role today.

“I just want us to keep getting better,” Martin said. “I want us to keep getting better because if you aren’t, then you are not growing. If you are not growing, then you’re dying.”

Martin steps into leadership at the flagship program at a time when the political climate often makes it tough for journalists to report. Martin says she thinks journalists play an especially important role “to help us understand each other’s experiences.” Without helping audiences dig into the nuances of why people believe what they do — and why the political is so personal for so many — journalists aren’t doing the job they are charged with executing.

“Yes, the words are changing and we’re all having to learn to use different language and to recognize different identities that were perhaps not part of our own experiences before. But that’s life. That’s learning. That’s education. That’s the news,” she said.

Martin said she takes inspiration from the way that Spanish-language and Black newspapers have crafted their coverage strategies.

“The origin of these news outlets was not just to talk about the politics that particularly affected these communities, but also to help people understand how to live in the new world that they were in: telling people things like how to register to vote, how to register your kids for school,” Martin said.

It is exactly this kind of work — often dismissed by editors and audiences alike as “unserious” for being service-oriented or because its target audience is those from historically underrepresented backgrounds — that Martin has always prioritized, and sees as essential now more than ever.

“What I want the most is for us to keep moving forward and not lose sight of our mission, which is to serve the public…I want us to keep doing our jobs because I think the country really needs us,” Martin said. “I want us to get more honest and stronger and more clear in how we serve people by helping them understand the world that does not lead them to carry the baggage of waking up and saying, ‘Whose side am I on today?’ That’s not who we are and I think not being that is so important.”

To think about equitable journalism means to consider the weight and totality of experience that exists behind each voice that feels unheard. That’s something that Martin’s “Morning Edition” co-host Fadel thinks a lot about, too. Fadel said she sees a major part of her job as being someone who can actively make and support a “safe space” for a range of voices, opinions, and perspectives in the editorial process.

Being fully present as herself in the host chair is a critical element of that, Fadel said — while also acknowledging that simply sitting in the seat doesn’t mean her newsroom, or any other, is done with the work of thinking holistically about what representation means in journalism.

“Change doesn’t happen because one person sits in a chair,” Fadel said. “It requires action at every level. This is happening at NPR, but of course there is more work to be done. Diversity isn’t just who is in a newsroom, but whose voices are in a story, and there is still a lot of work to be done there. We have a very diverse newsroom, but we need to always make sure it is more than white men whose voices get to talk about what happened.”

Fadel said she thinks all the time about how her own journalism can help change other people’s — and predominantly white listeners’ — perceptions.

“I didn’t see myself and my family in the stories I saw on the news. My father is from Lebanon and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Talking about people like my family in the news meant only talking about people who were ensconced in conflict. It was all conflict. But there are real people who exist in these places where there is conflict. And they are nuanced and may all experience pain differently and joy differently and have lives outside of the conflict going on around them.”

Sitting in the host chair at “Morning Edition” is a way that she feels she can change this kind of sentiment across journalism, writ large.

“Representation matters,” she said.

This kind of coverage, known as “horse race” reporting, has its downfalls. Researchers have found that horse race coverage amplifies extreme partisanship and can lead to voter distrust in candidates and news outlets. That’s why several members of the INN Network, including Spotlight PA, Injustice Watch, and The 19th, are trying a different approach to election coverage.

“We are really trying to rethink the traditional election playbook,” said Christopher Baxter, executive director and editor in chief of Spotlight PA. “Part of what we are always emphasizing as an organization is: How are we different? How are we providing unique value to people? What sets us apart?”

In asking those questions, Baxter said, the Pennsylvania-focused investigative newsroom “made the decision that all of our election coverage is going to revolve around the voter.”

“Before we write any election story,” he explained, “We really ask ourselves, ‘How does this help a voter make an informed choice?’”

The Spotlight PA Election Center includes helpful guides on how to research candidates, become poll workers, and vote. This year, Spotlight also launched a special election series, “One Vote, Two Pennsylvanias,” which explains, through policy proposals and issue-based reporting, the wildly different visions the candidates for Pennsylvania governor have for the future of the state.

Baxter is proud that Spotlight is focused deeply on the candidates’ histories, their sources of campaign cash, and where they stand on issues. “The goal of Spotlight is to have impact — whatever form it could be,” he said. “We want to provide something that people can’t get anywhere else.”

Providing unique coverage also motivates the team behind Injustice Watch, a small news organization based in Chicago that’s ​​dedicated to exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. This election season, as in years past, Injustice Watch has produced an interactive guide called “Check Your Judges,” which helps voters in Cook County, Illinois, learn about the scores of judges running for retention.

Jonah Newman, the managing editor of Injustice Watch and lead project manager on Check Your Judges, said that the guide fits squarely into the news organization’s mission. Since Injustice Watch’s founding in 2015, he said, “our co-founders were really interested in the lack of reporting on judges.” In particular, Newman added, Injustice Watch wanted to give more scrutiny to “these powerful elected officials whose decisions have a profound impact on people’s day to day lives in so many ways.”

Injustice Watch’s eight-person team spent months researching each Cook County judge’s legal experience, community involvement and political connections. They also sent all 61 judges a survey asking how they’ve worked to counteract disparities in the court system — something all but nine judges filled out. Then, they compiled all of that information into a comprehensive guide that includes a sample ballot that voters can fill out and take to the polls and a glossary to help make sense of specific legal terms.

“The reason we chose Check Your Judges as our motto and brand is because we want to encourage people to actually take these elections seriously — to actually participate in them,” said Newman.

Since Check Your Judges was introduced in 2016, Newman said that Cook County voter participation on the judicial portion of ballots has gone up. “We don’t take sole credit for that,” he said. “But I do think we’ve played a role in really bringing awareness in Chicago and Cook County about why these elections matter and then also giving people the tools and resources to make an informed decision.”

Injustice Watch and Spotlight PA have found ways to empower and educate voters on local and statewide levels. The 19th, which focuses on the intersection of gender, politics, and policy, has learned how to listen to voters across the country.

“We have a specific set of issues that we cover, and we ask questions that maybe some other outlets don’t,” said Terri Rupar, political editor at The 19th. “With that in mind, we started thinking about how a poll could work for The 19th.”

This summer, The 19th and SurveyMonkey teamed up to create and conduct a poll to find out what U.S. women, particularly women of color and LGBTQ+ people, think about politics and policy. The goal of the poll was not to cover the horse race (“Other people are doing that; we don’t need to recreate everything they’re doing,” said Rupar), but to find out what motivates those voters.

In mid-September, The 19th published the results of the poll, calling the project “The State of Our Nation.” They shared what more than 20,000 women and LGBTQ+ people across the country thought about topics like abortion policies, caregiving and health care.

“Part of what The 19th aims to do is to highlight the voices of people who mainstream media doesn’t highlight,” said Rupar, explaining that one of the ways they do this is through articles featuring individual voices.

“The survey is a macro version of this,” she continued. “It’s not necessarily individual voices, but it does allow us to give this information about the country broadly.”

Engaging with Spanish-speaking audiences has become increasingly important within the INN Network over the past several years. The 19th conducted its survey in both English and Spanish, selecting respondents from the more than two million people who take surveys on SurveyMonkey each day. Injustice Watch’s Check Your Judges guide is also translated into Spanish. And, for the first time this year, all of Spotlight PA’s voter guides are offered in both English and Spanish.

“Each election cycle, we are working to push our work out to more people in more targeted ways,” said Newman. In 2020, Injustice Watch sent printed copies of their guide to people incarcerated at the Cook County jail, “because we wanted to make sure that people who are most directly impacted by the justice system had access to information about the judges on the ballot.” This year they’ve ​​done the same, in addition to printing 120,000 copies of the guide, which they’re distributing through partnerships with print publications, community organizations, churches and local libraries.

Rupar said that The State of Our Nation results have already had an impact on which stories The 19th covers, and will continue to shape their coverage.

And for Baxter, whose organization offers their content for free to newsrooms across the state, some of his favorite examples of impact come directly from readers.

“They say, ‘Look, I see a Spotlight story in my paper, I stop and I read it, because I know that’s going to be something that’s going to be worth my time. I’m going to learn from it,’” Baxter said. “And that’s exactly what we want.”

These are just some of the ways journalists are covering the “gender beat” — a concept that began to emerge in large, urban U.S. newsrooms around 2016 and has continued to gain traction ever since. As my new research documents, the journalists working these beats are committed to serious coverage of issues that have historically been deemed un-newsworthy or too “soft” for the front page. But they also want to see news organizations do more to dismantle journalism’s pervasive macho culture — something that will require sweeping changes in a field that has been actively reinforcing masculine norms since the late 1800s.

“This is stuff that you don’t want to be forced into one corner,” said Emma Gray, who was a senior women’s reporter at HuffPost during our research. “It’s coverage that should, in an ideal world, cut across the entire newsroom.”

While a handful of publications have had gender-focused beats since the late aughts, many more added them in response to the 2017 Women’s Marches and the resurgence of the #MeToo movement. The journalists working these beats have churned out daily stories about high-profile sexual assault trials, explored the toxic side of Vice President Kamala Harris’s online fandom, and produced in-depth projects about the many ways the pandemic has magnified the gender gap. By the middle of 2020, there were at least 66 journalists who described themselves on Twitter as covering gender and related issues primarily for U.S. news organizations. (To arrive at this number, we used Followerwonk to search Twitter bios for keywords related to gender and journalism. We then rounded out the list through Google searches and word of mouth.) These journalists were working at metros like The Boston Globe, at local nonprofit startups like Michigan Advance, and at digitally native juggernauts like BuzzFeed. Many had been informally covering gender issues for years but said 2017 marked an inflection point for their work.

“[It] helped reporters and especially male editors realize the sort of snowball effect that can come from not valuing women’s issues,” said Erica Hensley, who launched a gender beat at Mississippi Today in 2018.

Hensley and Gray were among 20 gender-focused journalists my research team and I interviewed during the summer of 2020. Through these conversations, I saw how gender beats might help combat structural sexism in both news organizations and society, but I also came to understand their limitations. Most of the journalists we spoke to were conflicted about the existence of their beats and worried that dedicated gender beats could further ghettoize women’s issues.

“My goal is for this beat not to exist,” said Abbey Crain, who left The Wall Street Journal several years ago to create a gender beat in her home state of Alabama at AL.com. “Women’s issues and gender issues should be everyone’s issues. But it’s literally not, so I feel like we have to have this extra step so that we’re covering them at the same level.”

At the same time, many of the journalists we interviewed — especially those who cover sexual violence — stressed that the work they do requires specialized skills that have not historically been part of journalists’ training.

“Not just anybody can write about gender,” said Slate’s Christina Cauterucci. “It is a skill that requires honing and expertise in the same way that writing about economics or something requires expertise.” But she also sees problems in isolating gender too much: “If no one on the politics team feels equipped to write about abortion bans or their analysis is really surface level, it’s not good for the news organization, and it’s not good for readers or democracy, either.”

News organizations, many of the journalists said, must do more than add a few specialized beats if they want to provide coverage that accurately represents and serves all segments of society. They want industry leaders to do more to diversify newsrooms that remain overwhelmingly white and male.

“It’s not enough to only hire women and put them in a gender beat,” said Nishita Jha, BuzzFeed’s global women’s rights reporter. “One of the big things that’s missing in newsrooms is women in leadership roles and also women of color in leadership roles.”

Allison Donahue, who covers gender as part of her job at Michigan Advance, agrees: “I’m white. I’m middle class. I don’t represent everyone. I especially don’t represent everyone who needs to be represented in journalism … You have to have Black women, Latina women, queer women.”

Several of the journalists interviewed pointed to The 19th, a nonprofit news organization “reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy,” as an example of the serious, comprehensive coverage they wanted to see more of across the news landscape. They also wanted to see more gender diversity among journalists covering the beat.

“It would be great to have more non-binary, gender-nonconforming people in the newsrooms because I think that’s also a really important component of gender coverage,” said Gray, who is now a columnist and podcaster at MSNBC.

This isn’t the first time journalists have leveraged feminist social movements to improve news coverage of women. Second-wave feminism propelled women into professional spaces, including newsrooms, and many of those barrier-breaking journalists were inspired by women’s rights activists to challenge masculine norms around news coverage. They made some progress, but news organizations failed to provide long-term, nuanced coverage of gender inequities, especially as they relate to women of color. News stories also continued to perpetuate sexist tropes or ignore women’s experiences altogether.

When we conducted these interviews during the summer of 2020, there was already some evidence that attention was softening toward some of the issues covered by modern gender beat journalists, at least when it comes to coverage of sexual misconduct.

“The news environment has sort of moved on from #MeToo stories,” said Emily Peck, who was a senior reporter at HuffPost at the time of her interview. “Women are still coming to me with their stories. I’m still trying to look into them. But it’s just hard for those to break through right now.”

It’s also important to note that, in the year since we wrapped up our research, both Peck and Gray were laid off from HuffPost. The New York Times, meanwhile, recently announced it’s folding the In Her Words newsletter. The news industry is fluid, so layoffs and changes to distribution strategies aren’t uncommon, but decisions like these do raise questions about news organizations’ long-term commitment to gender-informed coverage. (This is also something I plan to address in a companion study.)

Still, most of the journalists we interviewed felt they were making progress in terms of how their news organizations address gender-related issues.

“I’ve opened the door to so many different types of stories and people that we wouldn’t have previously covered,” said Stephanie Ebbert, a longtime Boston Globe reporter who honed in on gender issues after the 2016 elections. “There were a lot of issues that just weren’t really on our radar at the Globe that I was able to turn attention to and highlight.”

So what, then, is the future of the gender beat in U.S. newsrooms? Newsroom managers would be wise to devote more resources to gender-focused coverage, but they must proceed with caution to ensure gender beats are more than short-term fads. That means recognizing the value of gender beat expertise as it relates to promotion, pay raises, and awards. Otherwise, covering gender may become another one of the non-promotable tasks that women disproportionately assume in newsrooms.

Newsroom leaders must also commit to eventually phasing these beats out — not because they fall out of vogue or the stories they generate become un-newsworthy, but because the work done by gender beat journalists pushes news organizations (and society) to a place where the lived experiences of women are no longer treated as subordinate to those of men.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies now offers six months of parental leave to birth parents and four months for non–birth parents, the company announced this week. That means the nonprofit — which has around 50 employees — is offering more time off to new parents than much larger companies, like The New York Times (18 weeks for birth parents), The Wall Street Journal (20 weeks for primary caregivers), and The Washington Post (20 weeks). The 19th, the nonprofit gender and politics news site launched by Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora earlier this year, also offers parents six months of paid leave. (Bloomberg is the most generous in the U.S. media industry, offering 26 weeks of paid leave to primary caregivers.)

As is irritatingly common with U.S. parental leave policies (this is, after all, the only rich country that mandates no paid leave at all), you’ll have to delve into the actual parental leave policy to see what exactly is on offer — it’s not six months of fully paid time: Poynter employees are required to use PTO if they want more than 12 weeks of company-paid leave; “once PTO is exhausted, if the employee wishes to remain on parental leave, Poynter will pay 50% gross earnings up to 8 weeks.” The policy also applies only to full-time employees who’ve been with Poynter for at least a year.

Still, kudos, again, to Poynter for actually making its detailed policy public. That’s something that few companies do. (I’ve asked Poynter if its new parental leave policy also applies to employees of the Tampa Bay Times, the paper it owns, and will update this post when I hear back.)

Mel Grau, a senior product specialist at Poynter and editor of The Cohort, Poynter’s newsletter for women in digital media, wrote about the tortuous path to a new leave policy.

In the past, Poynter, like many small nonprofits across sectors, offered a combination of short-term disability and flexibility with employees’ paid time off to provide time off with pay for new parents.

Our old plan didn’t apply to partners or adoptive parents. It relied too heavily on manager discretion. And the six to eight weeks of short-term disability simply wasn’t long enough, according to findings from multiple U.S. and international studies.

In the fall of 2019, I expressed to HR my dissatisfaction and belief that Poynter needed a new policy. I learned that others had tried and failed in the past; I was encouraged not to get my hopes up.

Instead, I was even more inspired to challenge the status quo.

So I brought the topic up with senior leaders whom I knew publicly supported women’s advancement. I informally surveyed a dozen or so colleagues about their opinions on the policy and asked them to join a future committee on the issue. Over the winter holidays, I compiled and shared research. In January, I casually brought it up to women on our National Advisory Board, one of whom was Emily Ramshaw, who made waves by offering six months of paid family leave to employees when she launched The 19th.

A few of my colleagues also initiated conversations about paid leave with NAB members. That led to an emotional, feet-to-the-fire discussion with the industry leaders who make up our advisory board and all Poynter staff, including the chairman of the board. The outcome? Three days after that meeting, Poynter president Neil Brown committed to establishing a more robust parental leave policy in 2020.

The winding path to get there isn’t uncommon. Grau previously reported on how it took nearly two years for women at The Boston Globe to get a better parental leave policy. In 2017, Katherine Goldstein wrote for Nieman Reports about how women at The New York Times got a better parental leave policy after fighting for about a year.

“If Poynter, a small nonprofit organization that’s been around for 45 years, can figure out how to pay for and accommodate six months of leave,” Grau wrote, “I believe your organization can, too.”

Cofounded by Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora, The 19th takes its name from the 19th Amendment, which, when ratified 100 years ago this month, granted women the right to vote. Their logo is marked with an asterisk to reflect that barriers to the ballot remained — and remain — for many nonwhite women.

The first (digital) front page led with a feature on the pandemic’s disproportionate economic effect on women (“America’s First Female Recession“) and a slate of election-related coverage, including interviews with potential vice presidential picks Susan Rice and Elizabeth Warren co-published with The Washington Post. The 19th has also cemented partnerships with USA Today Network (which will republish work across their 250 local news markets), Univision, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Early on, Ramshaw and Zamora (previously the editor-in-chief and chief audience officer of The Texas Tribune, respectively) knew they wanted a newsroom that “reflects the racial, ideological, socioeconomic and gender diversity of American voters.” As New York Magazine’s The Cut noted, 2020 might be the perfect year to build that diverse newsroom from the ground up: “While legacy media grapples with the fact that most employees are overwhelmingly white (77%) and male (61%) — and facing pandemic-fueled hiring freezes that make those statistics hard to change,” the 19th staff of 22 people is 91% female and 75% nonwhite.

The 19th also sought geographic diversity while hiring and counts residents of Philadelphia, Orlando, Des Moines, and New Orleans among its staff. Editor-at-large Errin Haines told The Cut that The 19th will cover women as “issues voters, as rural voters, as educated voters, as blue-collar workers, as Southerners, and as Midwesterners” — and not treat them as a monolith or single special-interest group.

Despite the pandemic throwing a wrench in just about every launch plan imaginable, Ramshaw and Zamora are starting out with a full staff and $8.5 million in donations — up from “nearly $5 million” in January . That includes $1 million from Kathryn Murdoch (who told The Cut that “her beliefs differ from her media-mogul family members”) and $500,000 from Craig Newmark (who gave after Ramshaw reached out with a cold email).

The 19th has adopted a nonprofit business model and will rely on donations, sponsorships for live events, digital advertising, and paid memberships starting at $19/year. At launch, The 19th counted 611 members giving between $5 and $999 and another 174 giving $1,000 or more.

Things have, uh, changed. But The 19th is still planning to launch this summer and has started doing some reporting earlier than planned.

“We had a moment in early March where we took stock of where we were,” Ramshaw, cofounder and CEO of The 19th and former editor of the Texas Tribune, told me this week. “We have money in the bank, but not much more is gonna come in any time soon. Should we just hunker down, delay the launch, and ride out this storm? For a hot second, that was our plan. But then it became abundantly clear that in virtually every arena except for mortality rates, women were going to be disproportionately affected by this pandemic…We had to stay engaged and, in some ways, speed up our plans.”

My conversation with Ramshaw, lightly condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

[ Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora are launching a national news nonprofit aimed at women and we’re dying to know more ]

“It seems like there was a niche nonprofit newsroom for almost everything, and I wondered to myself why no one had created one at the intersection of women and politics,” Ramshaw told The Washington Post, which will be publishing The 19th’s content until the site fully launches in August.

The 19th’s name refers to the 19th Amendment, which turns 100 this August and granted women the right to vote, though in practice it mostly applied to white women — that’s the reason the site’s logo includes an asterisk. “The 19th provides a great opportunity to talk about all of those tensions and all the work that is still to be done in terms of equity whether it is at the ballot box or beyond,” Zamora told the Post.

Here’s the sort of content The 19th says you can expect:

• Free-to-consume and free-to-republish journalism that reimagines politics and policy coverage through a gender lens
• Deep-dive, evidence-based reporting that exposes gender inequity and injustice, and reveals surprising and original stories on the issues that most deeply affect women’s lives, from health care to the economy
• A digital platform for civil conversations and community building, and national events that bring our readers into direct contact with their elected officials
• A newsroom that reflects the racial and socioeconomic diversity of American women and is devoted to covering all women with empathy

As for what you won’t find: “Cheap shots or cheerleading. Opinion or false equivalency. Partisanship. Horse-race politics. Turn-of-the-screw stories. Clickbait. (Sorry, not sorry.)”

The 19th is starting out with “nearly $5 million” in funding. That includes $1 million each from Kathryn Murdoch and the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ Reproductive Health and Women’s Rights Collaborative; $500,000 from Craig Newmark Philanthropies; and other substantial amounts from the Ford Foundation, Emerson Collective, Knight Foundation, Abigail Disney, Arnold Ventures, the Packard Foundation, and more.

It’s also launching with a team of five. Ramshaw is co-founder and CEO, Zamora is co-founder and publisher, Andrea Valdez is editor-in-chief, Errin Haines is editor-at-large, and Johanna Derlega is chief revenue officer.

Until the site launch, Haines will be writing stories that appear on The Washington Post, which The 19th describes as “our inaugural news partner.”

Today, women make up more than half of the American electorate and are more engaged than ever in our politics — marching on state capitols, voting at higher rates than men, running for local office and seeking the presidency in record numbers. Yet we remain marginalized in government and in the nation’s executive ranks.

Women are also underrepresented in politics and policy journalism and in newsroom leadership, which influences what stories are told, how the news is covered and whose voices are elevated.