Diamond Hardiman of Media 2070 discusses the vision for Black media ownership, the importance of media reparations, mental health support for journalists, and integrating art and creativity into storytelling to reflect diverse perspectives and experiences.
When I started Twice As Good Media I wanted to create a Black media platform. Simple, right? Well, not so simple, actually. It begs the question: what kind of Black media platform?
The kind that pays women journalists less than men? The kind that depends so heavily on ads that it’s hard to find the articles? The kind that features a host ranting at a camera for an hour?
No. No. No.
So that developed into something more specific: helping Black journalists and news consumers stay engaged without burning out. Great.
Enter my next problem: How?
From that point, a few Google searches led me to discover the mindful journalism framework, and that completed the puzzle.
We can help news consumers by applying the mindful journalism framework to our coverage of Black people and communities.
As I did my research from there, I came across an organization dedicated to helping Black journalists by repairing historical harm by media against Black communities: Media 2070.
Media 2070 published this essay by the same name, documenting exactly how media has benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade since the beginning of press history in North America, and they’ve expanded that work to offer journalists resources to help them and their peers tell better stories while challenging old colonial values in journalism, like notions of objectivity in a system built on slavery and white supremacy.
They champion Black media reparations, mental health support for journalists, and using creativity to imagine and create better futures. So, they’re obviously my people.
I would argue that the best journalism in history is already in alignment with the mindful journalism framework, as are several other approaches to journalism that you’ll hear about next.
Diamond Hardiman is a cultural organizer, and the Reparative Journalism Manager at Free Press, the parent organization of Media 2070. I invited her to talk about the inspiration behind the work they do, how to do reparations journalism, and why.
Our name is also a timestamp. Media 2070 is about a vision, a purpose that we have by the time we get to the year 2070. And that vision is that Black people will be able to own and control our stories all the way from ideation through production to distribution.
What that includes is bringing about media reparations. So, how are we getting investments and resources in the space and the culture to be able to do that in the ways that we are unable to now and in the ways that were inhibited by structures, resourcing, and a lot of other things that are at play?
Our purpose is for us to be able to tell those stories. And the vehicle that we use to get there is a vehicle we're calling media reparations.
Yes. So I joined the organization in 2020, which is the same year that the essay was released. My colleagues Alicia Bell, Colette Watson, and Joe Torres were a lot of the main drivers of creating this essay. Joe Torres wrote a book called News for All the People that chronicles things similar to what's in the Media 2070 essay.
For example, he goes through the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred in the place I'm from, Colorado, and he talks about how newspapers portrayed it versus the reality of the violence that occurred. It was very pro-military and really applauded violence. He has a whole book where he goes through history and pulls out a lot of these facts.
That influenced a lot of his work and a lot of the essay. We also have a colleague, Alicia Bell, who did some of the work I used to do, working in communities to try and build relationships between journalists, newsrooms, and communities. What we kept finding is that there is a serious lack of trust.
Anywhere you go, you could be in North Carolina or LA, and you will hear the same thing. When you take a step back, they were analyzing the structural reasons for mistrust, or lack of trust, and lack of relationship that can't just be fixed with solutions that don't include acknowledging that history and that past.
That's where a lot of the inspiration came from. Colette Watson is an artist and a cultural organizer as well. Thinking about the ways that media impact the way we think and the way our culture functions, all that merged together to create the essay.
From the very first newspaper in the United States that ran continuously, they were building not only their content but their infrastructure and profit models on the oppression of Black people and Indigenous people. The very first newspaper used their pages to create ads for enslaved people, and the editors would sometimes even act as the broker.
If you were looking to buy a person of African descent, you would go to the newspaper to do it. They revealed a lot of that from colonial times to the civil rights era, thinking about how radio licenses were handed out, with many going to radio stations that were pro-segregation, and a lot were owned by KKK members. The violence inflicted on Black organizers who used the radio to organize is also part of this history. Now, we look at Facebook, Meta, and Google, and think about the algorithm and dissent. They wanted to chronicle all of that, and from there, it has grown marvelously into a consortium of technologists, artists, journalists, and media makers who think about the structural foundations that influence the way we consider news and media.
Yes, there are a few. We chronicled a lot of the harm in the essay, but we also chronicled a lot of resistance. We chronicled folks like Ida B. Wells and Medgar Evers and the different ways Black organizers, artists, and journalists have used these vehicles to push back against these systems all along.
That’s one method I definitely want to name, and it's very connected to this method called movement journalism. Movement journalism specifically uses journalism to connect to movement and organizers in pursuit of liberation, which is, to me, not a radical concept because historically, that’s what Black journalists have had to do.
They had no choice but to do so. But when we talk about objectivity, there’s a lot of pushback around journalists being able to be in the community, although we know objectivity is really a myth and is all based on positionality and what you consider the norm to be.
We also pulled from the actual reparations movement and reparations thinkers about what it looks like to address these harms that we’ve mentioned and initiate processes of healing so that there is restoration in the community in ways that aren’t just monetary but also structural.
Manon Media just hosted a mental health event for journalists in June. That is part of this concept of the culture of journalism and how we make it something safer for the Black journalists that are in it and also for the Black consumers who are reading it. When I talk to journalists, one of the biggest challenges is the pace of the industry. It is very hard to be mindful and grounded.
The pace of the industry and the capacity within news organizations often mean there are only one or two, or one of three people of colour in a newsroom. That plays into this idea of objectivity and perspective on where you’re coming from and what you think is valuable, whose information is prioritized.
On top of that, there’s this thing I’ve noted as double jeopardy. If you are reporting on something harmful that happened to a community you are part of, not only are you doing the work of reporting something that is already possibly traumatizing or hurtful, but it is also something impacting you on a personal level, not just on a work level.
That’s a lot of the infrastructure we’re talking about when we discuss initiating processes of healing and repair. So it is about content, it is about making stories that feel better and resemble the communities they are for, and are accessible, but it's also about these infrastructure pieces as well. So reparative journalism is really about how do we prioritize processes of healing and repair, knowing that we are starting from a place that wasn't prioritizing either of those things?
Yes, I think you had mentioned it before we started, but it’s like multiple audiences. There are the types of stories people are reading, the ways that journalists are creating them; we’re addressing that. But we’re also addressing funding—the funding gap between corporate media and independent media, the gap between the amount of money that goes into journalism from philanthropy as a whole, and the very small percentage that Black-owned papers get. So there are a few levels to it.
I meant to say this earlier, but I got this term from someone else. We also talk about people who do acts of journalism. There are plenty of people who share information with the world using their phones and the ability to record. Many people are doing acts of journalism, even if they’re not, "professional journalists."
What I would like to see by 2070, as far as media and journalism are concerned, is a lot more art and beauty in terms of creativity in the way we tell stories. I think many people already have those ideas now. So I would want to see it by 2030, but in terms of how we can tell stories in more expansive ways that match a lot of our oral storytelling and historical storytelling lineages.
Where it is a much more communal act, something that brings people in, less transactional, and more about how we tell it with style and flair that isn’t just put in this box of objectivity.
How can we use technology? How can artists communicate? Some papers are already doing things like that, like the Baltimore Beat, adding a lot more art back into newspapers. That would be my dream: harnessing technology and art to tell stories in our own ways.
If folks want to check us out, join our consortium or learn more, they can check out media2070.org. We're always looking for folks to collaborate and partner with, so share what you're working on.
This world is way closer than we may think, and I think it's closer than 2070.
