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Also, I learned quite a bit being outside of the normal path to journalism with regards to what gets covered and why.  Think of all the little stories that fall through the cracks.  It’s very easy to start producing stories according to a certain worldview.  Even when journalists are reporting on something that seems counterintuitive, many times, we are still following that same script.   It’s one of the most difficult challenges I’ve faced at the helm of Racialicious.  While I like to think of the site as a decentralized collective, the team looks to me to be the public voice as to what decisions we make, editorially.

Over time, our work migrated from being an internet space about pop culture, to inhabiting a no man’s land between between activism, journalism, and counter-narrative creation.  This was drilled home when we started reporting on the London Riots, last year.  We received a total of four first person narratives about what was happening on the streets–but the first one filed was a conservative take on the event.  Readers expressed their disappointment in the comments, noting that while they appreciated us covering what happened from a variety of angles, they didn’t want to read the same kind of conservative perspectives found in the mass media.  We believe we have a responsibility to showing varied sides to world events, but that was sobering.

We’ve also had to contend with multiple ideas of truth–and find a way to get the community on the same page about topics like Israel/Palestine.  To top it all off, we are feeling the industry-wide pressure on around funding and sustainability.  We’ve carved out our space in the conversation – but can we keep doing what we do with a balsa-wood-and-bubble-gum business model?

Whatever problems I had with institutions, my years in the field brought me to  believe that journalism–the unimpeded flow of quality, fact-checked, and truthful information – is critical for democracy.  And if it is critical for democracy, it should not be a luxury stashed away behind paywalls. It should be out in the open, where the public can use it to hold people in their communities accountable and to be informed about the goings on in other nations and other galaxies.

If I believed all that, I could not continue to pretend I was just a writer that did reporting on occasion.  I cared about who has access to this information and how the stratification of access and news information impacts society. I concluded journalism goes hand-in-hand with social justice.

And so, in spite of myself, I became a journalist.

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