Journalism Is Changing—and Gabe Schneider Wants Newsroom Leaders to Catch Up

Gabe Schneider is dissatisfied with media reporting. In just a few years, the 24-year-old reporter has become a stalwart voice for change in the journalism space while charting his own path in the industry. Amid pangs of discontent in American newsrooms after the killing of George Floyd last year, Schneider, the former Washington Correspondent at MinnPost, started writing about inadequate media coverage of race and how media reporters and critics have struggled to cover race in American newsrooms. That early work turned into The Objective, a Substack-based collective of young writers covering the shortcomings of American journalism, writing about topics like media reparations, the need for paid internships in the news industry and the whiteness of media criticism. The operation has 2,100 free subscribers, a rotating cast of regular writers and republishing agreements with industry journals Poynter and Nieman Lab. The group also published a spirited response to the controversial “Harper’s Letter,” which drew more than 150 signatories and saw 150,000 page views since it was published in July. Adweek caught up with Schneider to discuss the imperative behind The Objective and how media reporting should change in the post-Trump era. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How did The Objective come to be? Gabe Schneider: At times of intense unrest and in times when Black folks are killed, there's always a certain knee-jerk angry reaction—that's justified. Throughout my life, I've seen this happen so many times. There's an anger in me that prompted me to want to write. I sent pitches out to a few places and I got told no, so I put them on Medium. And they got pretty big responses. I thought to myself, "If the current media criticism outlets don't want them and people want to read them, then why not make a space?" I started working with other folks to edit their pieces and it came together very organically as a collective of people interested in challenging media reporting to be better, and do better and actually center what we think are the largest problems when it comes to journalism in the U.S. There's an anger in me that prompted me to want to write. What were those first pieces on Medium? The first one was a piece about George Floyd and the way that outlets like the AP framed his killing initially: in the passive voice, giving credence to the police narrative, I don't think really thinking about what they're publishing and not really waiting to understand the situation. But it wasn't just a critique of the AP, it was a critique of the sort of coverage that we've seen time and time again when it comes to police killings of Black people in this country. Then, I wrote a piece about social media policies, touching on what we've seen at The Washington Post with Felicia Sonmez and Wesley Lowery, but focusing specifically on Kendra Pierre-Louis at The New York Times and how she was mistreated in that they used their social media policy to wield power against her talking about how racism is bad. The third piece was about how pundits keep using "woke" as a way to dance around the fact that they're actually criticizing Black journalists or Black people. What were we seeing in American newsrooms at the time you started writing what would become The Objective? Around the country we were seeing—from small outlets to public radio stations to major institutions like The New York Times—Black employees that wanted to act as allies try to reckon with the complicity in the failure in newsrooms to actually cover Floyd's killing in a fair way, in a way that accurately represented the story. There are so many communities that have been covered so poorly by so many institutions. And that reckoning, to this day, for many outlets, still hasn't come. What did you see as the response from people tasked with writing about media for a living? Was it inadequate? It was wholly inadequate. I think there was an initial instinct to cover it as a one-off story. This is the story of American journalism. American journalism has failed on the whole to reckon with the fact that it covers many communities poorly: It covers gender poorly, it covers race poorly. What I saw from the major institutions that still have media reporters and media critics was not a very thoughtful or coordinated response on how to change the way they’ve been doing coverage. And when I look at that space, it's a mostly white space. It's a mostly male space. It doesn’t adequately represent what we should be seeing in journalism in the U.S., and that presents a problem. Media reporting and criticism seemed to be revitalized in a way during the Trump era. It feels like there are more people doing this work at more outlets. What kind of media reporting do you see happening and what's missing? A lot of the media reporting that we saw in the last few years is very reactive to Trump and not necessarily dealing with the underpinnings of how we got there. I wish that media reporting looked at the systems at play. There's politics that go on at the Washington Post, whether or not the Post wants to acknowledge it. There's politics that go on in every newsroom. Everyone has their own opinions and biases. And that's something that we don't get enough discussion of when I see a lot of media reporting. There's a politics that goes on at the Washington Post, whether or not the Post wants to acknowledge it. What do writers tell you when they say they want to write about the media? What I hear from folks, especially younger folks that are student journalists, is that they're unwilling to be quiet. They're willing to write pieces to challenge the dominant narrative. They have Twitter, they've talked to other people, they look at the way that major institutions look. And they say, "I really don't like this. I think this is horrible. I think you've done a terrible job. I think these mistakes that you made were inexcusable and I hope to do better." That's a really good step. It's going to take a while for these younger folks—I say younger folks like I'm not the same age as them—to work their way up into the ranks and actually have leadership roles. I think the ideals of media reporting are often at odds with the ideals of getting a job. There's tension—you're reporting on or criticizing potential employers. How do you square those things? The longer that I've been a journalist, the more that I don't want to put myself in a box and have to deal with being told no, being told my perspective isn't the story, that this is not something we should be writing about. The longer I'm doing journalism, the more I can't vibe with that. So if I have to get another job and keep writing, that's fine. I'd rather do that than be in a staff writer position where I'm not going to write the stories that I think are important. That said, The Objective has been a really great vehicle to build up a community where we can do some fundraising, and we can hopefully pay folks and I am hopeful that we can build a space where we can make that happen. And we actually have media criticism that challenges a lot of the dominant narratives. What would you say to full-time media reporters and critics? What would you say is the imperative to shaping up and covering the real stories of American newsrooms as you see them? It's hard for me to critique them without knowing where they're coming from. I tend to be of the mind that they've already done a lot of the work and a lot of the reading right? I hope that they understand the underpinnings of American journalism, and how American journalism was used to capture fugitive slaves. I hope that they know the history of American journalism in that way and the history of objectivity. I hope that they understand that there were folks like investigative journalist and civil rights movement leader Ida B. Wells and other journalists that have been written out of the historical narrative by predominantly white newspapers. That really informs my work and my challenge of trying to cover things in a way that I don't think has been historically done by media reporters. The name of your organization is a reference to objectivity, which seems to come up in nearly every interview I read with [New York Times editor] Dean Baquet or [former Washington Post editor] Marty Baron. You seem to preach transparency about journalists' political or personal biases and experiences. What do you think about the objectivity question? It's really important for news outlets to state their values and to talk about why they have those values and how those values inform their reporting. They don’t have to say "We're a Democratic news outlet or Republican news outlet," but they have to say, "We don't believe in lying and we don't believe in racism." Those are really clear values that if you say them out loud, then, in your reporting, you're going to say explicitly, "This thing is racist and it's bad." We don’t need to say, "Well, this person said it was racist and this person said it wasn't and so now we have them dueling it out." I think if newspapers want to be seen as credible by everyone—not just a very specific subset of American society—they have to reckon with the fact that a lot of them just haven't been transparent about their values. And they haven't taken clear stances on what it means to be a newspaper in American democracy. It's done a lot of damage in communities of color because they just haven't reckoned with that. They've written for a very specific subset of white people. So I'm hopeful that instead of rehashing the conversation about objectivity over and over, we can have a conversation about what those failures look like and what it means to actually report out without lying about or obfuscating your biases. It almost feels like lying to me to not lay out that you're reporting on something from a very specific perspective. News outlets always have biases. They're biased toward human rights, they're biased toward democracy. So you see them making choices about their biases and not choosing these ones, right? A lot of the news outlets operate with generalized platitudes, and aren’t really reckoning with what they mean, like "Democracy dies in darkness." OK, well, what does that mean? Are we going to actually challenge the president when it comes to racism? Are we actually going to talk about how voter suppression that the Republican Party has enabled for years is bad and bad for democracy? We should be talking about that. And if we don't, we get into this problematic area of normalizing voter suppression as a legitimate political tactic. And it's not. It's something that excludes Black people in the United States from participating in democracy. It's not OK. And it's shameful to me that a lot of newspapers won't reckon with that, and they won't acknowledge it directly.