The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Reynolds Journalism Institute or the University of Missouri.

Grid News and Punchbowl News. Two new national newsrooms launched during the pandemic. 

Both claim to be different takes on how to reinvent journalism in the U.S. But beyond being well resourced, it’s not yet clear how either of these newsrooms will be more innovative than their predecessors beyond attrition. 

“We’re writing for anyone who wants or needs greater clarity on the most important stories of the day, and we think there are millions of people out there who fit that description,” Mark Bauman, of Grid News, told The New York Times. 

In a field where well-resourced newsrooms are dominated by cisgender white men (and less so, cisgender white women), “journalism innovation” is still too often a euphemism for rebranding or a shallow reflection on reaching “new audiences.” Consider that both Grid News and Punchbowl News were launched by well-resourced white founders. 

Centuries after American journalism began to take shape, it remains innovative for mainstream newsrooms to reject segregation in their staffing, empower (not just hire) a diverse staff, and attempt to provide tangible resources or useful information for non-white elite readers. Rather than being common, these ideas remain novel in well-funded major newsrooms. Instead, newsrooms dress up old methods and practices as new, wasting valuable resources that could better serve communities and time. 

“The crisis facing journalism is also about journalism’s very purpose, and its public benefit,” Darryl Holliday wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review. But while newsrooms claim to be tackling exactly that, many newsrooms old and new, in their hiring practices and articles, seem to be doing more of the same. Holliday, co-executive director of National Impact at City Bureau,  acknowledges as much with the failure of newsrooms to hire and promote diverse perspectives for decades “that might have opened new avenues for innovation and revenue that come with authentic representation.”

That’s exactly right: Journalism innovation often skips the necessary because of a failure of perspective and imagination. 

Centuries after American journalism began to take shape, it remains innovative for mainstream newsrooms to reject segregation in their staffing, empower (not just hire) a diverse staff, and attempt to provide tangible resources or useful information for non-white elite readers.

Newsrooms cannot claim to be doing important work if they are failing to reach substantial portions of Americans that have a stake in the journalism that’s being done. They cannot claim to be doing something radically different if their staff looks like the newspaper staff from 10, 30, or 50 years ago. Ignoring these larger issues is why “journalism innovation” remains a buzzword to prompt discussion about small (or “bright and shiny”) problems in newsrooms that shy away from the larger obvious problems that Holliday mentions. 

At RJI, I’ve written about innovations that are often overlooked in favor of easier operational changes or rebranding. Some of these practices have and were already implemented by the historic Black press, immigrant-centered newsrooms, and more recently, small (often under-resourced) newsrooms focused on experimentation.

Journalism innovation does not just need to be a change of workflow or content management system. Journalism innovation can be treating your underrepresented employees with respect, especially as it pertains to social media policies. 

Journalism innovation can be traditional mainstream media outlets considering what media reparations look like after many actively participated in harming Black people and communities in the U.S. 

Journalism innovation can be shifting a newsroom’s coverage from how a sensationalized national event impacts politicians and elites to how it impacts the people living in the community that will have to pick up the pieces. 

Beyond this, there are of course numerous innovations and experiments happening around the country, often in underfunded and under-resourced smaller newsrooms that are fundraising by their teeth. Some newsrooms have chosen to provide resources directly to the community for their informational benefit, like El Tímpano or Outlier Media are doing in Oakland or Detroit. Holiday’s newsroom, City Bureau, is trying to reinvent what newsgathering looks like and who gets to be a journalist by training and outfitting citizens to effectively gather the news where governments fail. And others, like Word in Black or Get Current Studio, are trying to work with the historic Black Press and other newsrooms to ensure they remain able to distribute critical community information and remain sustainable. 

Journalism innovation needs to be centered on the most pressing needs in journalism that are obvious to those often not afforded a seat at the table. If American journalists believe their work is central to an inclusive democratic society, then well-funded mainstream American newsroom leaders (at both new and legacy publications) can’t look to a new website, a new brand, a new product, or a new medium as the sole driver of what innovation means. They must acknowledge and learn from the work that’s already been done by newsrooms often run by people that look nothing like them, give them credit for those changes, and connect them to tangible resources.