In recent years, I’ve been among those involved in a public conversation about the role of the press in a free society.

In 2020, I published an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the media’s failures to diversify, and need to reckon with the way “objectivity” has been used for decades to silence black voices inside mainstream media institutions and to empower powerful actors, particularly the police, to advance mistruths.

In early 2022, I published Black City, White Paper — a historical account of the Philadelphia Inquirer and, by extension, major white-owned newspapers to serve the black residents of their cities and the black journalists in their newsrooms.

In 2023, I published A Test of the News in the Columbia Journalism Review — laying out my mosaic theory of journalism and calling for rigor, fairness, context, transparency, nuance and clarity to be the principles that professional journalism seeks to uphold. Later, during an interview with Nieman Reports, I expanded upon those principles and what they mean for journalism education.

In 2024, I participated in a forum hosted by the Knight-Columbia First Amendment Institute about the future of the free press. In my essay, I argued that the market-based press is broken, and in favor of the establishment of a federal trust for news and information.