 Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining episode three of Informed and Engaged. The journalism team at Knight Foundation is committed to providing journalists with the resources to serve their communities and produce journalism in the public interest. We are also here to help address the important questions being asked today about our industry. Today our guests on Informed and Engaged will talk about the role of journalism in journalists in upholding and dismantling systemic racism. We'll look at how the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired conversations in communities across the country and inside newsrooms. As we often try to do at night, we are dedicating the space to crank discussion driven by journalists. And with that, I'd like to introduce Knight Foundation's Director of Journalism, Karen Runlet. Jennifer, thank you so much. I'm very excited about this episode. We've invited four journalists to take the conversation where they will. Right now in the U.S., this moment is being described as America's reckoning with racism. And this cultural shift is inspiring brutally honest conversations in the homes of immigrants about anti-Black racism within their own communities. Today we ask allies or accomplices. Here now are Karen Atia, Global Opinions Editor at The Washington Post, Karen Kay Ho, Global Finance Reporter at Quartz, Fabiola Santiago, Columnist at the Miami Herald, and our moderator, Tanzina Vega, host of The Takeaway. Tanzina. Hi, everyone. Hello to my Karen panel and Fabiola. That's how we'll be talking about this. Thanks so much for joining all of us today. I'm really excited to be here. We got a lot of reckoning to do on today's show. So why don't we dive right in? Let's kick it off with this Miami Herald op-ed that had many, many signatories, all of whom were Latinos, writing about how they support Black Lives Matter. Now this is something in terms of reckoning that I think kind of a lot of us experience in our own communities where, and I would like to broaden the descriptor of immigrant to really include community of color, people of color, because I don't think immigrants in and of themselves have, I just was a little concerned about the framing, right? Is it immigrants that are reckoning with anti-Blackness, or is it communities of color more broadly in this country that are reckoning with anti-Blackness? And I would say some of it is both. Karen, you have a lot of, Karen, Atia, I have to make sure we're clear here. You have a lot of thoughts on this particularly. So give us a sense. You're saying that immigrant communities are reckoning with race, how? Yeah, so I guess I'll be super, super specific because I think that these conversations could deal with a level of specificity that often get missed in our discourse. So I'm speaking from a background of being in the African immigrant community, specifically Nigerian, Ghanaian immigrant community, my family, my parents came from there decades ago. And so when we were talking about these layers of sort of respectability politics, assimilation, how do you, even my name, gosh, Karen. We're going to talk about that too. Yeah, yeah, you know, all of these markers, right, of what it means to come to this country and try to fit into this society and move up. And so I think that they're, you know, and I've been honest about this, I think it's time for this reckoning that for so many black immigrants, African, West Indian from the Caribbean, there's this sense that, well, you know, if you just work hard, if you just go to the right schools, if you engage in enter professions like doctor, lawyer, engineer, not always necessarily because people have some sort of innate talent or passion for it, but often because those are the highest paid or high paid positions. And in this capitalist society to gain acceptance, if you are well paid, then maybe you're, you can put yourself at a distance from blackness and as it's defined in America. And I think right now it's what's happening. I mean, I see this firsthand literally with my parents and with friends who are my age, people who are my age who are dealing with their relatives. It's coming to this rude awakening about what it means to be black in America. In this country. In this country. Again, and, you know, we could go for hours about this, you know, black in America does not speak for being black around the world, obviously. And we're seeing these reckonings with anti-blackness, decolonization, frankly, white supremacy and how it's manifested in different places around the world, according to local context. But here in this country, yeah, my parents, you know, they're like, we weren't black until we got here. We were just, we were just greats. We were just guys. We were, you know, affiliated with certain ethnic groups. But when you came here, when they came here, they were black. And being black comes with a price, a heavy price. And I, and I think it does come with a price. And I think you're also, Karen, describing somewhat of the layers of classism also that are involved in that conversation. I hear a lot, the op-ed that we're referencing in the Miami Herald, specifically, Fabiola, I'd love to hear, you know, what you think about this, because I kind of had mixed feelings about it. I think it's time for a reckoning among Latinos of anti-blackness for sure. Our media reflects anti-blackness. Our communities often reflect anti-blackness. But maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker, Puerto Rican, who grew up in, you know, a community. And for a lot of us here, our, we are, we consider ourselves part of the black diaspora. And we also have great proximity, both culturally and racially to blackness. So there's sort of a, I don't think everyone subscribes to this idea that they want to be closer to whiteness, necessarily. I think there are lots of Latinos I know who affirm their blackness. But we are in a moment of sort of reckoning with that. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I don't, I sort of, I have mixed feelings about the fact that we all want to be white. Well, you know, Miami is an interesting city. It is a unique, a very unique city. 70% of the population here is Hispanic. And most of the largest number from that percentage is Cuban American. And then within the Cuban Americans, there are the recent arrivals. There are the, you know, 90s arrivals, the 80s arrivals. I mean, you could go back generations of immigration. And, you know, the belief system is diverse, is diverse. I like the way that we started with the, let's be specific, right? Because one of the issues that often comes up is the generalization of an entire community. One of the things that we grapple with in the conversations is when someone who, you know, is, I, for example, I've seen journalists that I respect that will say, oh, the Cubans in Miami, blah, blah, blah. Well, not all the Cubans in Miami are like that. We can't agree on a whole lot of things. So, but I think that what is most, if I say, if there is a trend, I would say it is about ignorance. It's about not even recognizing the racism, right? And we have to first own it to then do something about it. And that has been, I think, one of the blind spots in this community because we feel comfortable in our cocoon. We feel comfortable in our multiculturalism. And that often serves as camouflage, as I said, in one of my columns for the fact that, you know, there is a rotten spot and that rotten spot is racism. And it has to do not just with, it's not something that is only something that is an ill in the Cuban community, but it is in other Latin American communities and it is even in the African American community, right? That what I've experienced in years and years of reporting is that every time I went into a community, once they got comfortable with me, they were able to voice all sorts of prejudices that they had. And there were wonderful conversations for the most part, but I had to get through a lot of layers of misconceptions. And in my case specifically, I have, when I came to this country in 1969 as a 10-year-old, the elementary school that I went into had just been integrated. So both me and the new kids in the school that were from Liberty City, right? African Americans from Liberty City were both new. And I learned English through, and by the way, you're gonna think this is out of this world coincidence, but I, the girl that used to sit next to me, her name was Karen. And she was, she was, I- We did it on the panel, Fabiola. And we sort of bonded through our love for Dark Shadows, this soap opera. And I told her about the Spanish soap operas, and she told me about the American soap operas. And- So there was a cross-cultural exchange that you had with Karen. Karen, you know, with my limited English and her limited Spanish. So my introduction to America immediately included blackness, right? Like, you know, half the kids in my class were Cuban white, and then there was another half that was black. I think that what you're describing, Fabiola, does resonate for, again, and that's why I mentioned the specificity of saying where I'm from, being from New York City, what type of community I grew up in, who my background is, you know, because those things, those cultural and racial proximity, sometimes we're not even aware that we are part of the larger pan-African and black diaspora, specifically if we're from the Caribbean. Karen Ho, you talk a lot about this specificity issue. Tell us what it means for you when you're talking about being specific and sort of dismantling the monolith that is, I'm sure you deal with this too, Asian Americans. I think it comes from the fact that, like, I'm not an American person. I grew up in Canada. So even when I was lumped into talking about and started to report in American news outlets, and people would say, they would use the term Asian American, I would clarify and say, I don't know what it's like to grow up in America. I don't know what it's like to consume only American pop culture. And just like Karen and Tia, like I think it's really important to specify, even when I went to graduate school in New York City, and I would make casual jokes, like I'm a Chinese international student in the way that people don't think of Chinese international students. Going back to what other Karen said, I think talking about how communities that are under these huge umbrella terms aren't monolithic is really important in terms of, like we said, education, income, life experiences, you know, resources available, even in terms of global perspectives, how often people travel, what their experience is like if they're their first or second generation. Because I think even in terms of what we've seen in news and coverage regarding Asian America, like I think an Asian Americans experience with anti-blackness is very different when you are Vietnamese, if you're a first generation Asian, like Chinese American, or if you say grew up in Koreatown and your parents experience, you know, the LA riots, like I think those experiences are very, very different, even in terms of your cultural understanding of anti-blackness in America. So that just comes from my own experiences, especially with the American immigration system and identities. And then I think it really goes back to what Fabiola was saying, you know, I think it's really looking at these huge populations and saying, how can you make these broad statements? Just like in the way that white Americans have said that they don't like being generalized, especially when they come from a specific county or state, you know, like we all belong to groups where we don't like to be generalized. And I think that's why in this discussion regarding anti-blackness, I think it's really important to bring it up in terms of specific, you know, like how are you contextualizing, whether it be a historical reference or, you know, like the interaction, you know, like we haven't even gone into, like I read a lot about geopolitics and what is going on with Chinese investment in African countries. So I think like those kinds of things you have to, like it is our jobs as journalists to provide this kind of context and say where does it come from? How is it different? What are the business interests or historical interests involved? How does colonialism play a role? You know, like all of those things, you know, like even the type of Chinese that I am is my parents are from Hong Kong. So they have British colonial history and that's very different than mainland Chinese history or rural history. And Canada is another, you know, British colony. So it's like, it has lots of layers. And an experience of a Chinese person growing up in a small white town is very different than New York City, like Queens, like a Chinese person growing up in Queens is very different than LA or if they grew up in Richmond, Virginia, like Constance Wu. So I think that's very important in how we're also talking about this moment and even how different groups of Asian Americans are even talking to their parents about anti-blackness, like where are those parents coming from? And the more that we can be specific, the more we can ground these stories in identifying what also makes them different and also what are those lessons that are broadly applicable to a lot of different people. I mean, my family is from Puerto Rico and I recall during Hurricane Maria and prior the economic crisis, having to explain that Puerto Rico is not a state, it is a colony of the United States but its citizens are American citizens. I mean, this is basic information and this was not available in the broader context. At least people weren't understanding it that way and it was pretty shocking. Speaking of reckonings and race and newsrooms, Karen Atia has brought some news to the fore today with a little ward called a Pulitzer and I'd love for us to talk a little bit about that because I've shaken some trees when it comes to newsroom diversity in the past and this is not something that has gone away. In fact, it is, I would say we are really reckoning now. I mean, with the stories that are coming out, I'm sure all of us has a story right now that we could tell about something bizarre that's happened to us in a newsroom. We're all women of color, we're all sitting here. I don't think I've ever had a panel that looked like this and the person that was putting this together said this should have been Mount Rushmore and I was like, this should be what your executive suite looks like, frankly, if you're looking for real newsroom diversity. But that's really sad too. I'm joking, but it's actually really sad and Karen, your experience with this is not, you edited Jamal Khashoggi and what happened? You were left out of a Pulitzer nomination. How does that happen? Well, you would have to ask in some ways what was going through leadership's mind and I think, let's just be real, I think that part of the tax of being particularly a black woman in this world, in the society and any workplace is not a mean from that. It can mean that you are, and I've said this before, you are invisible and yet hyper-visible at the same time. So it means that it can really literally mean they just don't think about you, right? Until they have to think about you. Until they have to think about you, until you write a tweet that has been said by multiple people that get folks, white folks upset, you trigger that white discomfort and then you're super visible, you're super on their minds. And I said this on Twitter a couple of hours ago, I've never done what I do for awards. I mean, I think they're nice, they're great to have, but I'm motivated more so by the prospect for change and for justice. And so that's what was motivating me to do what I did with Jamal and trying to bring attention to this case. And I was aware, I guess we're here to be real, right? So I'm just gonna be real, I knew as a young black woman in a position where I'm dealing with a story that is pertaining to the Middle East, which is pertaining to national security types and you see very often white, older men, because the Middle East is so tough, it's so dangerous, that's where real journalists go, that's where it's hazardous, right? And there's so much to be said about kind of like Orientalism, I believe it was Edward Said, who said, the Middle East is a career. And I realized, even dealing with Jamal, that I don't look the type dealing with Saudi Arabia, these authoritarian states, I don't look the type like a foreign correspondent. I literally had a, you're not at the post, but another editor say, oh, well, dealing with Jamal, did you ask your foreign correspondents for help while you were editing him? And I'm like, what, like, no, I was a foreign correspondent, believe it or not, right? Like, you're constantly having to, it's almost like you wanna walk around with your resume all the time, and that's the other thing. But okay, but I'm tired of walking around with my resume. I know me too. Karen, Ho, Fabiola, are you tired of walking around with your, because I swear I used to recite it and all the awards and all the, I'm sick of it. Are we sick of it? I don't know, is it just me? Yeah, yeah, it's exhausting. You know, I've been writing for 40 years. It'll be this, this is my 40th anniversary at the Miami Herald. And I've lived through many, many stages of, of it in both, you know, ignorance and then lots of genuine attempts to get the community to be represented in our newsroom. And the problem is that nothing is sustained. So that you have people coming in and out. You know, it's a revolving door of minority journalists, right? And that in a community like Miami is, is just devastating sometimes to coverage of issues in depth. We're very good about the breaking news story. We're very good about the investigations, but the things that, you know, the things that I think bring a community together are the kinds of journalism that we did do during a period of, you know, reckoning that we also had through the various, you know, incidents in Miami of police, police brutality. And specifically also with the Cuban community during the Allianz Saga, you know, we, I, one of the things that I tried to do was specialize in that kind of explainer piece, right? Where you, for example, enlighten people as to why calling Miami a banana republic is a slur. Or whether is there a problem between Hispanic officers and black communities? All of those, all of those issues are issues that need to be looked at in a different way, not just in the coverage of the shooting, not just in the coverage of the event of a child plucked from his home and, you know, and returned to his father. The context is always very important. The understanding of, you know, of the cultures involved deeply are very important. So we've had really good times. I think the Miami Herald is a newspaper that covers those things very, very well. But I think we are missing on the race front. And right now they just posted a job for a reporter that will delve into the race topic because we lost, you know, this is what happens, what I was gonna get to the point of tokenism, right? That the thing is that we have, you know, we look at reporters, minority reporters as tokens. If we have one of them, then that's diversity. And that isn't the case. It isn't the case by far. And so we always come up short. And another thing that has impacted, I think, the coverage is the economics, right? The failure of the newspaper model. And those are the stories that have fallen behind. Everyone is gonna go for the breaking news. That's what's read. That's what gets you the, you know, the numbers on readership. And then the pieces that take the longest time, which are the ones where you, you know, you build relationships with sources, those are being left out of the conversation, have been left out of the conversation. Right, and those take a lot of time. And Karen, Atea, I know that you said, you know, you're not in it for awards. I think a lot of us would agree, we do this job. We don't do it for the money or for the awards, right? We do it because there's something bigger that we wanna get to, right? We really wanna tell stories. But let's be honest, if we're being honest, a Pulitzer is something that would be a huge boon to anyone's career to have that. And whether it's a Pulitzer and Edward R. Murrow Award, we can go down the list, the Emmys, you know, whatever. So I do think it's important to have that Karen Ho, I'm wondering when you see the landscape right now and you see this sort of the stories that journalists of color are telling about having worked in their newsroom, when you hear about Karen doing all that work and not having her own name submitted to the Pulitzer board, what are you take away from that? I mean, are you encouraged to seek after these awards? Are you encouraged to keep doing your thing? What do you think, what are you taking away from this as you're watching it? So it speaks to the point of my career. A, like no one can tell how old I am because of my skin. I learned a lot from the black community about the importance of moisturizing and I think that's really important. Every day sunscreen. But it is, like people can't tell how old I am and so there's this conversation regarding, like I'm in a situation where I think about like having children in my point of my career and also about like what is the next step when you move from the end of early career towards like are you gonna look at management? What kind of awards are you gonna do these jobs that are long-term projects? And I think the really difficult thing right now is that with all of these stories, is it's really up to us, like the really sad realization that if we are gonna be nominated for awards, it's just going to be us nominating ourselves. We cannot wait for other people to do it for us. The thing that has been interesting about all of these new roles that Fabiola brought up and that we've seen that Shani O'Hill was on the record about turning down was just the failure to incorporate race into everyday jobs. So like I don't explicitly cover race, but I have written a lot about race and economics in the last two weeks, specifically talking to a lot of black economists. And I just think it isn't normalized for people who are, if you wanna do the work, I was talking about this, with Karen Runlet, like I think it's very important to do the work of being a real ally in the newsroom. Like if you care about your black colleagues, make it so that they're not the only people in the newsroom thinking about these issues, thinking about who their sources are, who is getting promoted, who is getting nominated for awards. It's very sad that like none of us can do it all, right? Like it's not fair for the people on this panel to be role models in investigative, in opinions, in radio, in all of these different beats that clearly need our voices. We know that like in business and econ, there also isn't a lot of diversity. And I briefly tried, you know, feature reporting. I also tried entertainment reporting, which also has a lot of diversity issues. So it's like in each of us in our lanes doing that work, we are all very proudly supportive of each other. But also I think it's, I'm always mindful of how important it is for me in whatever I'm doing and wherever my career goes, that I'm setting a path for it that saying what I went through isn't acceptable for the younger journalists coming up behind me and my peers. So I think in saying why it needs to change and being really clear about that, I think it's important we are in a moment. I'm really, really curious about how this moment is going to be used, if it's going to be seen as like how the leadership is going to be held accountable. You know, I think, and that includes industry magazines and publications, tracking diversity reports and, you know, advertising and all that stuff. But I think it's going to be really interesting going forward and I think if they're not holding themselves accountable, they will always be women like us holding them accountable. And I think that's something hopefully they know is going to happen. And with that, I'm going to throw it to the other Karen, Karen Rundlund. Thank you. You know, Fabiola, I wanted to follow up with you on one question. You had written a column that received incredible engagement and the headline was you didn't wear a damn mask and were back to record COVID numbers in Florida. And you said that that's the kind of headline and column that receives great leadership and engagement. And then you will write something about racism or Black Lives Matter and it won't get the kind of attention. Would you sort of address what you think about that? Yeah, it's very frustrating for me because I have throughout my entire career written about issues of race in different ways, right? In whichever way the Herald was shaped. I once had something called the Minority Affairs Beat, right? In which it lumped everyone together on every topic that you can imagine under that beat. And so I got the opportunity to cover the Black community which was to me an incredibly important job in it by itself. And of course, I did get the feedback of like, what are you doing here, right? It's not your role to be here. And by the way, my editor at that time was Sydney Trent of the Washington Post. And so we did good work together. And then I've moved on through many, many, many jobs in writing because I do think that we should develop ourselves, right? And that we should live a good life. And so when the Miami art scene began to be the thing, I moved into the visual arts. I was a visual arts writer. I've written a food culture column. I've done a million things. But specifically now with my column writing, right? When I started writing a column, the Herald does have Leonard Pitts who's an amazing writer, Pulitzer winner. It has Carl Hies and it has all the other voices in the community that do write and are invited to write constantly op-eds. But I felt that as the local columnist, right? The person who lives in Miami and lives here and that I had to incorporate everyone. And I did. So I ended up like, for example, writing about these black men, young men, who were minding their own business. And one was a realtor. The other one was a PhD student at St. Thomas University. And the realtor was sitting in front of a house chatting with a friend before he was going to a football game. And when police officers decided that he fit the description of what were they doing of some robbery that had occurred and was plucked out of the car and we had all the video cam and all that from the officer's cam. And then the PhD professor, I mean, a student, was, he was just driving. The police officer thought he had committed an infraction and he ended up on the ground with a gun pointed at his head, right? Even though he had done the, and everything right. So I wrote that column, I interviewed the two men, I took their photos, I looked deeply. And of course, what did they have in common? They hadn't come in the same cop, right? Then they, the two did not know each other and they had met online through, in social media when they realized what had happened to them had happened with the same cop. And I had really high hopes for that column. I had high hopes for a readership and for engagement with it. And it just flew under the radar. And all the technology to make that column work was, what I do with every column was done with that column, right? So you have to, once you take away from the formula, once you take away from the formula, well, what didn't go right, right? I think what is left behind, this is the same thing that happened to me early on of what is she doing here, writing about this, right? Why is she doing it? Why is a Cuban American columnist writing about a black issue? The same thing with the Trayvon Martin trial and with the Trayvon Martin case. I wrote about that. I was the first columnist to write about it when I saw a brief in the Orlando Sun Sentinel, about a 17-year-old from Miami Gardens being shot in the community in which he was a visitor. To me, it was a slam dunk, something's wrong and fishy here, right? Right, right. And so, and I wrote, those columns had better readership because of the high-profile nature of the case. So, there is, I think, there is the interest at some point when something is new, but again, and it's not just about race, it's also about profundity, right? When I write with, there was an issue here in the community with the Cuban Museum. And so, I took a lot of time to look into that issue very deeply. And again, something that was supposedly such a hot potato fizzles into less readership. And I think we have to, there's something out there that is right now a major stumbling block to our sort of cutting through and reaching people. And I think that's a bigger conversation for journalism to have about how do we get out there, things that really, really matter when people have their eyes on the mask, right? On the coronavirus and the mask. And then another day, it'll be whatever happened, whatever the scandal. And it's, I don't have the answers to that one because I've, you know, I like to find out where is it that I'm missing the connection? But, but you know, it troubles me that people aren't pausing to write things with more depth and are just focusing on the headline. Thank you, Fabi. I just wanted to bring up one or two more questions that are coming in. They're coming in from the audience. There are a couple of questions actually about ownership. And really what's the return on investment for media and journalism to change their approach on how they cover immigrants and race? So what is the question ownership? Karen Ho, are you able to take that? I mean, I had done business economics at CJR and I really looked at it and I said, you know, you're, we know that American communities are fast growing. It's like they have not just money to spend but they are deeply engaged. You know, they share, they share on multiple different social media platforms. Social media editors who are in the know, know about the power of your family forwarding you an article on WhatsApp and KakaoTalk and all of these other communities around the world. You know, I get news articles sent to me all the time. I think when Fabiola brought up engagement, I think it's really about when you have audience engagement staff and social media editors who are dialed into these communities and how they, how are you reaching them? Not just on Facebook or Twitter or all these traditional means. There's also about really thinking about what are the stories and the competitive advantage? The economics are like, if you are engaged in these communities, you will report stories that other competitors don't have. That's just the simplest thing, right? And these are, whether it be business, it's sometimes about sports, it's sometimes about economic development, it's about who is getting discriminated when they're trying to buy a home. You know, like all of these stories and huge issues. And these are the people who are like paying taxes and affecting how a community is evolving and growing. You know, the kids' struggles in schools, you know, like what is going on in these college towns? Like it affects life on an everyday basis. And if you're not thinking this sort of intersectional way about how communities of color are part of these communities at large, then you are missing out on a bigger picture. And if you're only continuing to focus on an affluent white or even working class white community, then you're missing a huge part of the picture in the way that the country is changing at large. And I think that's a really basic thing. It's just like, do you wanna do a good job in journalism by reflecting the way that the country is changing? And that involves really thinking about how these communities are changing themselves. And like when it goes from like a moral failing to an accuracy and like doing a plain good job of the central tenants and ethics of journalism, then we change the conversation a lot. Because I think too often diversity is seen as like a moral imperative, instead of like basic accuracy and business tenants. And I weigh in on that too. I'd love to, because I think to your point Karen, it is seen as a moral or lack of as a moral imperative, but I've actually had people say, well, this is hot right now, race is hot right now. So we gotta cover this and whatever you wanna pitch to me right now, we're open. And so that's how I've been able to get all these hot stories across newspapers and television. And then guess what? When it's not hot, it's gone, right? Which I've experienced too. So I think to answer the question of ownership, I mean, I covered the intersection of business and tech and all these things for the media desk at the times. And this was a question that we were reflecting on a decade ago about how to stay relevant at the New York Times. Now, the Times has now done the almost the impossible where their subscriptions are now floating a lot of the weight. There was a big question about would people pay for this, right? But they're the New York Times, so people are paying for it. And so kudos to them, they found a way to make it work. But traditionally, ownership relies on a couple of things. Advertisers who have deep pockets, who are willing to fund your journalism online, those dollars are not as, I guess the return on your investment online per dollar, per digital dollar just isn't the same as buying a print ad used to be. So the digital ad game is a struggle for a lot of up and coming outlets that are trying to reflect and trying to talk to communities of color and be owned by communities of color. So you've got an ad model and or a subscription model which is a tough buy, which is a tough sell if people are already oversubscribed to things like Hulu and Netflix and everything else that we're subscribing to. Then you have the model that's emerging now which is a nonprofit model, right? Which is how do we hook into a major nonprofit and hopefully get the dollars that we need to do the journalism that we want that's aligned with the mission of that nonprofit which we're starting, we see a lot of that with the Marshall Project and with ProPublica. Those models have been super successful but again, if the funding isn't there then what happens to the journalism, right? Or how much does the journalism affected by or influenced by the funding? So I don't want to turn this into a business school conversation but I think that I love the idea of ownership. It's just when you're talking to communities of color that have largely been lacking in so much capital. Generally speaking, we just don't have the capital to enter a lot of these conversations. It becomes tricky for us to really say we're gonna own something and with the closure, for example, when we looked at what happened Johnson Publishing, right? The preeminent publisher of Jet Magazine and all of these other black-owned media. We saw there was such a shift in what happened not being able to sustain then you had to include private equity in those conversations. So ownership is a great idea. It's just a much harder way I think to execute without having the dollars that you need to open the door. I could just add to that. I mean, what we're seeing in the last even couple of days is even black-owned outlets even though, you know, they're small but black-owned outlets that are facing reckonings of their own when it still comes to their treatment of women, black women. And so when you have structures that are replicating value systems of who is valuable, who it can be exploited, who can be used for their labor, who can be targets of abuse and harassment. It doesn't always necessarily mean that outlets that are owned by still usually men of color, black men, or at least the sort of symbolic level. It doesn't mean that things are always better, right? So I would say that. And then, you know, as far as in general, like the case, and I think it turns into that, like the case for diversity and it seems like every few years you're trying to make this case for diversity. And for some reason it's like, you know, all of a sudden it's... We have to... It's hot, it's hot. Well, yes and no, it's not. It's not that they're necessarily seeing it as vital to their mission, right? Diversity, as I've said before, I mean diversity means nothing without empowerment. And it means nothing if you have, you know, faces that will populate a brochure and make the people in the room as one of my professors from Northwestern a nice consumer boutique experience for the white people to feel and to signal that they have the people in the room but if there are no pathways for black people, people of color, particularly women of color to be able to advance, to be able to make those calls about coverage, to be able to even be able to go into communities into our own communities and come up with stories that are authentic, that are not just voyeuristic, that are not just helicoptering into the communities and saying, look at what the natives are doing, you know? And you can tell, you can tell when stories are coming from that authentic place. And so when, you know, most many of us are at white legacy media operations and that's the struggle even as you're writing, you're like, who is your audience? What does it mean for me to be a black woman writing for an audience that largely is white and affluent, older, male, I think for the post? And so these are like the questions that diversity doesn't go far enough. It doesn't go far enough. It's, we're looking at really challenging and transforming systems that have certain groups dominating that we're challenging hierarchies. You can have diversity all you want. Plantations had diversity but there was a hierarchy. I'm serious. Like there were differences, it's true. I mean, we just have to really, sometimes these buzzwords get thrown around. I agree. And, you know, and I think you don't think about what is it that we're really trying to get at to make these places safe for us to do the work that we want to do? What is it about, you know, journalism? Why are we here? Who are we here to do this work? Who are we here to serve? This is a service profession, I would imagine. And sometimes I think, you know, we forget that that sometimes service doesn't always come with the big dollars. So in that sense, you know, it takes, I think it's a real reckoning, like not just of this sort of racial reckoning but I think we're questioning, who are we and what are we doing here? What is our role? And are we just neutral observers of our society as it's changing, moving? Or are we a force that's helping to shape that? And I think for those of us who are women, women of color, black women, we know the power of the media to shape what people think about us and about our communities. We can't afford this illusion of neutrality or this view from nowhere, right? Because we know that what we do is not neutral, it's never neutral. And so to a certain extent, it is an uncomfortable moment, I think, but it's a necessary one, as my mom said, you know, every cause has its time. And I just, you know, I think we just, this is a time to think, we're all sitting at home. Anyway, it's time for us to really think about what do we want? What do we want to be? Who do we want to be? And how does journalism, what changes do we need to make in order to make things better for each other and for those who are gonna come after us? So end of sermon. I think that's the perfect way to end the panel, actually. Oh, snap. Okay. I think you did it. I think, I guess I'm gonna see us all off. So Karen Atia is our Global Opinions Editor at The Washington Post. Karen Ho is Global Finance and Economics Reporter at Quartz and Fabiola Santiago is an award-winning columnist at the Miami Herald and I am Tanziana Vega and I am host of The Takeaway on WNYC and PRX. And this has been awesome. And until your C-suite looks like this, we got a lot of work to do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.