The 19th's Strategic Plan

[The 19th]

It’s really cool to see The 19th working in the open and releasing its three-year plan publicly.

It’s an important mission that just gets more relevant and vital over time, and getting there requires taking an inclusive approach:

“The 19th’s mission is to produce trustworthy, representative journalism that serves women and LGBTQ+ people in the United States who are excluded from the promise of the 19th Amendment by their gender, race, ethnicity, class or disability.”

Some of these plans are audacious for a non-profit newsroom of its size. Building a $30M endowment, in particular, is an important step towards independence: it’s a way to ease fundraising pressure year-on-year and ensure that no one party can have an outsized influence on its reporting or goals. Given the sizable forces that don’t want reporting that serves women and LGBTQ+ reporting in the current environment, it’s a really smart move that makes me really hopeful about its future.

And their focus on security and working to mitigate a threat model is something every newsroom needs to be doing — and particularly the smaller, startup newsrooms that tend to serve communities that don’t have any other journalistic platform.

“We’re building the systems and safeguards needed to protect our newsroom and ensure we can keep showing up for our audiences, no matter what challenges arise. That means preparing for growing risks independent media faces, including legal threats, security breaches and platform instability.

We’re undergoing various security trainings for all staff and conducting regular scenario planning and risk assessments, among other measures.”

I love that they’re narrating this in public. It’s important work. And it’s a way of working that other newsrooms would do well to pay attention to.

[Link]