[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post]

I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone.

"What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operation that has raised nearly $60 million and employs 55 people. And in a sign of its growing ambitions, the 19th has now hired veteran news executive LaSharah Bunting, CEO of the Online News Association, as its first vice president, a role created to build up the 19th’s fundraising and budget operations."

It's also grown an endowment, which allows it to have a safety net and continue to grow and experiment. The ambition for the endowment to underwrite the newsroom's operations is meaningful: this would represent a fund designed to allow reporting on gender, politics, and policy to be undertaken sustainably. I don't know of any other similar fund in media.

Not mentioned here but extremely relevant: the amazing work Alexandra Smith, its Chief Strategy Officer, has been doing to redefine how to think about audience and reach on a fragmented web.

These are all signs of a forward-thinking newsroom that isn't content to simply accept the status quo - and, crucially, plans to stick around.

#Media

[Link]