What role should the free press play in ensuring the survival of our democracy? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has some thoughts.
In the inaugural episode of The Amendment, Errin and Nikole discuss the current state of journalism, the high stakes of this presidential election, the importance of historical context in our political moment, the challenges faced by Black women in journalism and more.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project, reporter at The New York Times Magazine, Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University and a leading voice on the vital role of journalism in our democracy today.
Follow Nikole on Instagram @nikolehannahjones and X @nhannahjones.
Episode transcript
Nikole:
Should be some bourbon in this glass.
Errin:
Listen, I wish that…no, no. There probably shouldn’t be at this hour.
Nikole:
I guess we still wanna keep our jobs. Maybe
Errin:
If we don’t have a democracy, is it gonna matter for the bourbon? I don’t know. But, um…
Hey, y’all. Welcome to The Amendment — A weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. This democracy is still unfinished business. There’s still way too many people who are unseen and unheard in our politics, whether we’re talking about women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, [or] anybody who still remains marginalized in our democracy. That’s what The Amendment is about, and that’s who The Amendment is for. Together, we’re gonna get to a better understanding of why our democracy remains unfinished and what we can do about it.
Today’s guest is Nikole Hannah-Jones, my sister in this work. She published The 1619 Project four years ago that looked to reframe America’s history by starting our country’s history in 1619, the year that the first slave ship landed on our continent. After winning a Pulitzer Prize for her work with The 1619 Project, Nikole was offered a tenure track position at the University of North Carolina, her alma mater, but then was denied that position when a group of conservatives challenged her credentials and created major backlash to her. People did rally to her defense, and she eventually was offered the position, but Nikole decided that she wanted to go another way. She rejected that offer and went to Howard University, a historically Black College, where she’s currently the Knight chair in race and journalism. The 1619 Project is now an Emmy award-winning series on Hulu I highly recommend that you watch, and I wanna talk to Nikole today because as we start this election season, Nikole is just such a leading voice on the importance of journalism to democracy. So we’re gonna get into the importance of historical knowledge in journalism, what it means to be a Black woman in this industry, and Nikole’s fears about the future. Welcome, Nikole.
Nikole:
Thank you, Errin.
Errin:
Okay, so first let me say that I think the ethos of this show really does align with you and your work perfectly ‘cause I know it’s clear that you care about journalism that includes the footnotes and the asterisks. You’re including the historical context and you’re disturbing the dominant narrative. So, I wanna start by asking you really just about the context of this moment at the beginning of this pivotal election year. How are you thinking about the relationship between a free and healthy press and the survival of our democracy?
Nikole:
So, as you know, there are many things that I do not agree with our founders about, but one thing that they got very right is understanding that a robust free press is a necessity in a democracy — that people cannot self-govern without information. So I don’t think that you can disconnect where we are in the country politically with what is happening with media in general — particularly, I’d say, local media, because local media is the most trusted media. Local media, of course, reports on government and what affects your lives on a daily basis. And we’re really seeing, you know, the purging of so many journalists, the loss of so many journalistic institutions at a time when we need credible information more than ever at a time where we are really at risk of losing democracy, where we’re seeing large swaths of the population actually explicitly saying they want authoritarianism.
And I don’t know that the average American actually knows how much they’re missing out on, because it actually feels like we’re getting a lot of information. And it feels like I can go on TikTok, or I can go on IG, and I’m getting “news” all the time. What we aren’t able to discern is the quality of that information, and where is that information coming from, and has that information been vetted? And, if, you know, there’s no one covering your local school board or covering your county commission, or in the state houses, you don’t actually know what’s happening that you’re missing out on. So, I don’t have the answers. That’s what I always say the beauty of being a journalist is: We write about the issues and expose them, and other people have to figure out how to solve them. But if we don’t solve them, we may lose our democracy. And again, I don’t know that we’re going to realize that until we’ve reached the point of no return. And we’re very close to that right now in America.
Errin:
Yeah. Certainly, as journalists, for us to keep asking the questions and also just to keep pointing at things and saying, “you know, something’s not right here” and “something needs to be done about this.” I think that is something that frankly is central to our role as journalists. But you know, we are also in a moment where history is up for debate. Didn’t see that on my Bingo card as a young journalist, but here we are. And, I mean, I think you and I have both talked about, just, I’m able to cover democracy because I’m a student of history, right? I’m able to cover politics because I covered race for so long, so I know what we’re actually talking about, right? The unfinished business of our democracy. Race is the unfinished business of our democracy as well. And so, being able to have that language and that fluency helps us to get to that more honest and accurate record of where we are. I wanna ask you about: One — the attack that we’re seeing on history, why that matters, why people need to continue to push back against that, why you continue to push back against that.
Nikole:
Well, we know we cannot disentangle the attacks on history, the attacks on what they’re calling critical race theory — which is really just tacks on any thing, any social-justice, anti-racist curricula — from the 2020 short-lived racial justice movement.
Errin:
Reckoning: over.
Nikole:
Right. You know, and, and all of us who are students of history knew the window was always going to be very small, though I don’t … I certainly would not have predicted the level of the backlash and the swift success of the backlash. But we knew a backlash would be coming, or at least that we would just ignore, you know, go back to the status quo. But, you know, 2020, the mix of the pandemic and us all kind of collectively witnessing this lynching on national television in a protest movement where, if you look at the polling, large numbers of conservative self-identified Republican White Americans were also seeing that we had a race issue. Seven out of 10 Americans at one point said they were having discussions about race in their household at the top of the movement. One out of 10 Americans participated in a racial justice protest, and this was the most racially diverse, multi-generational protest movement in the history of the United States. So there was going to be a consequence for that because what you saw was, during that movement, people were making the historical connections. They were no longer just seeing what happened to George Floyd as being about that moment and that Black man and the whole bad apple police officer. But that, you know, an entire history leads to that moment. And 1619, the year, the 400 year struggle was really the lexicon. And so people were making those historical connections. And, so, in some ways, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at what the backlash would try to do — the backlash to that social justice moment — would be “Let’s not allow people to learn the history that helps them put this all together.” They say, you know, explicitly, basically the way that you kill the social justice movement is you kill the social justice curriculum in the school. You don’t allow people to learn the history that would explain, well, why are Black people struggling? Why do we need these policies like affirmative action? That there’s a history that built that. If you don’t learn that history, then this idea that affirmative action discriminates against White people, that Black people just want handouts, that we are a fair society and what’s unfair is people talking about race all the time, then you’re much more susceptible to that message. So the backlash to history is an effort to mandate racial ignorance, and by racial ignorance, that is basically mandating historical ignorance. And that then paves the way for the really regressive policies that we’re seeing also being passed around voting, around women’s reproductive rights. All of these things are related to each other. The more ignorant you can keep the masses, the easier, right? The less pushback you get on any of these regressive policies that you’re trying to pass. The problem is: Conservatives have architected a decades-long strategy, and they are being met by a… I wouldn’t even call it a resistance, right? [But] folks on the progressive side who are defensive, who are fractured, who aren’t really that much better on race than the conservatives that they mock who are also uncomfortable with, you know, maybe the racial justice movement went a little too far. And so we’re not seeing a counter-organizing, but what we are going to see, I fear, you know, they’re attacking programs like a program in California that seeks to stop Black women from dying in childbirth. Like, this is going to be dangerous.
Errin:
Existential for people, yes.
Nikole:
Like not just, you know, a rhetorical battle, but a battle that actually is going to harm and take lives. And we don’t see a counter-organizing. And I think we try, you know, the message that DEI is racially discriminatory or, you know, CRT makes White children feel like they’re the oppressor. It’s a very simple message. Propaganda speaks to the heart, not the mind. And we are countering with, you know, a complex message that’s actually true and factual but is much more difficult to process and doesn’t really stand up. Or we run away, right? So much of what progressives did in the face of the anti CRT campaign was to be like, “Oh, no, no, we’re not teaching that. We’re not teaching that to kids.” Well, I’m like, “Well, actually, you know, teaching highly sophisticated historical analysis of racial inequality, it would be amazing if you were teaching that to third graders.”
Errin:
Yeah. What’s wrong with that?
Nikole:
Like, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we just are back on our heels, and there’s going to be a lot of suffering. Because it also, then, again, going back to our profession, if we’re then covering, you know, these court cases or the gerrymandering case of like, “Are these wins for Democrats or Republicans?” And not saying, “Is this a win for democracy or not?” And can we understand that actually in America, democracy is 60 years old?
Errin:
Yes.
Nikole:
That multiracial democracy has always been contested, that we can go back to the period of reconstruction and see the roadmap for what’s happening right now. If you don’t have that historical basis, then you’re going to cover what’s happening in a way that does the work of conservatives who say, “If democracy is multiracial, actually we don’t want it.” And I just think the political class of reporters is just really ill-equipped to cover that on a sustained basis. Like, we’ll see the story, but then the daily reporting erodes the impact of those bigger stories that actually do get to that analysis.
Errin:
Yeah. Yeah. This brings up another thing that you’ve talked about a lot, which is the importance of skepticism in journalism, right? What should we be preparing to be skeptical about in 2024? And, and really, what are some of the truths that you are holding onto going into this election?
Nikole:
I mean, we better be skeptical of damn near everything. I mean, you know, I’m old school, so I remember in J[ournalism] school when we were told,”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Right? And it’s like we both believe that we are innately skeptical as journalists, but then we are also, at the same time, deferential to power consistently, or being afraid we will lose access to that power if we report in a truthful way. So, going into this election, one: How, again, how are we going to cover Donald Trump? How do you call a lie “a lie?” You know, we have to be thinking about the old rules, the politeness of the coverage. And I’m not saying be impolite.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
But I’m saying what that ends up being then is deferential or not truthful, that we have to be able to state the truth. We have to be clear. We have to figure out how to not just cover Trump, but all of the ways that democracy is being eroded across the board. Like, I mean, I would say who we need to be most skeptical of is ourselves on, you know, our own dogma of, you know, I was reading the other day, someone was saying, I mean — the same line we’ve been hearing really since 2016 is — we have to understand, we can’t dismiss the Trump voter, we have to understand the Trump voter. Well, at this point, what do we need to understand? What, like, we know exactly, right? We know who the Trump voter is. And I think because we do see them as representative of White America and want to still, you know, vindicate White people as good people, even if they’re voting for, you know, the known liar who led an insurrection, that even if they know all of that and support that person, that they’re still innately good people. I’m actually not concerned, and we shouldn’t be concerned with whether they’re good or bad, but why are they making the choices that they make? And what are the dangers of the choices that they make? So I don’t feel like we’ve learned those lessons. Like, people are still shocked that corporate, rich, White people support Trump. How are you shocked? Like, we uncovered this after 2016. So we don’t have enough skepticism of our own narratives. You know, when you see a report is saying, “Well, the economy is actually doing very well, but most Americans don’t know that.” Whose fault is that? Is it, you know, they’re like, “Oh, Biden is not getting the message out.” We are the ones who relay the message. I personally know three people who got their student loans forgiven, who like woke up one day. My sister — 50-years old, has been paying student loans since she was 19-years old when she dropped out of college, right? And one day wakes up and has an email that says her loans are forgiven, and she just starts crying.
Errin:
Yes.
Nikole:
Right? How many stories like that have you seen? We are making these choices, and we are making choices, again, that reflect our own personal interests, our power, what a bunch of elite people who make news decisions decide are important, and not the reality for most people on the ground or not what most people actually need to know. There’s almost no coverage of most things that impact people’s lives. So I hope going in that we have the most skepticism about ourselves, and particularly in an election that is quite literally going to decide how much democracy we have left. So that’s what I hope that we’re going to see, but I doubt it because we’re gonna have to see a major shift occurring that we have not seen thus far and occurring very quickly.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
So I’m scared.
Errin:
Look, the reality is that we’re also both Black women who have built our careers on telling the truth in public, right? Even when that meant afflicting the comfortable, even when that meant—
Nikole:
Afflicting ourselves!
Errin:
Things getting a little uncomfortable for us. Exactly. Uh, personally, professionally. So, I mean, look, yeah, I know that, you know, like me, before you ever picked up a notepad or a pen, that was something that was in you. And so I just wonder if you can talk about just where that comes from, for you as a Black woman. Why do you still do it despite what you know are the costs and the consequences of telling the truth in public?
Nikole:
Yeah. I think most Black women who decide they want to become journalists, um, made that decision because of what we didn’t see, or what we did that was not reflective of our communities. So often what drives me to write now is I look at coverage and I’m frustrated by it.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Nikole:
To this day, right? And I’ll say, “Wow, this issue is so important. And they’re not seeing the essence of it.”
Errin:
They’re not seeing the thing.
Nikole:
Right. You know, it’s like they’re either reporting around it, or they just don’t know enough of the history, or they just don’t put it together in the way that I would. And then I can tell that story. And I can be like, “Wait a minute. You know, there’s been 200 stories written about this thing, and none of them have gotten right to the heart of it.” So that’s certainly what drives me. I’ve always been driven to be a journalist by a sense of injustice — a sense that, um, only certain people had the ability to craft the narrative, understanding that narrative, more than anything, is what drives policy decisions. That, unfortunately, it’s not data, it’s not research. It’s narrative. And that we had to have some lever of control over that narrative if we were going to bring about a more just society.
Errin:
You know, I spent a lot of my career covering Black women who tell the truth in public, right? And what the consequences have been for them. You also were on the receiving end of that. But I know this is a thing that you’ve been watching. It’s a thing that you comment about on social media, right? And often this truth-telling, especially in this moment in our politics for Black women, comes with targeted attacks. Right? I’m thinking specifically about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, um, they come to mind. But I wonder how you have kind of seen, um, those consequences evolve as a journalist who has also spent a lot of your career reporting on race, and how you even confronted that reality since you created 1619?
Nikole:
I don’t know that the consequences have evolved. I think Black women have clearly always faced consequence for speaking the truth, and what’s long been the case is many Black women therefore have suffered in both their health and their longevity. What’s different now is Black women are in positions that we have not ever been in, in the history of this country — that we have, um, at least the appearance of power, and that is driving a certain segment of our society absolutely wild. You know, if I were Nikole Hannah-Jones in 1975 doing my journalism for Essence or Ebony, I would not face the types of attacks that I have faced. So, in some ways, it is our ascendancy, or perceived ascendancy, that is drawing these types of really coordinated attacks. The problem is so often then when we as Black women are met with this type of coordination, we stand alone.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Nikole:
We don’t have necessarily that similar type of coordination on our behalf. And when we do, the results can be changed. I mean, when that type of coordinated attack happened to me in my tenure battle over the University of North Carolina, that was one of the very rare moments where Black women had all of this coordination on her behalf having her back. But can we think of another recent moment in history where that happened?
Errin:
No.
Nikole:
The only protection I had in that moment was so many people from so many different organizations spoke up. Otherwise, I would’ve had none. So, I think, that’s what we’re seeing, is Black women are in positions, often symbolic. Right? So many of the attacks against me in the 1619 Project was because it was a product of the New York Times. Right? It was because the New York Times would dare put out something like this with someone like me at its helm, and then so, you know, not back away from it under attack. And so you have to try to then discredit me and the institution because of that. But I think the key really is like, “Who are we doing this for? And why do we do the work that we do?” If your motivation is you wanna be famous, or you wanna be able to have on your resume that you took x, y, z home, or that you need to prove to White people something, then yeah, all of this probably will destroy you. But most of the people who have attacked me or my work just have no idea what I come from, who I come from. I’ve come from nothing. I could return to nothing. I don’t want to, but I can do it.
Errin:
Right, yup.
Nikole:
Yeah. But I know that if I return to nothing, the people in my community will not rejoice at that because I’ve never sold them out and I’ve never sold myself out. And, so, I don’t even remember what your question was, but hopefully the answer was somewhere in that.
Errin:
Yeah. That and then some. I mean…
Nikole:
I mean, it’s been a lot in the last four and a half years since 1619 published.
Errin:
Yes. And part of that journey has led you to the Mecca — to Howard University — where you have established this incredible Center for Journalism and Democracy. And I have been there, I have been so privileged to participate in the work that you are doing. So I know that there are amazing and incredible things happening there, and I want to talk a little bit about that. What is the work that you are trying to do at the center, trying to really prepare the next generation of journalists to be those truth tellers, to connect journalism and our democracy, and just leaving behind this honest and accurate record of our country. How are you doing that work at Howard right now? And why is it important that you are doing that work at Howard right now?
Nikole:
Yes. So, you know, if you wanna put a smile on my face, ask me about Howard. It’s just been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life, and even more gratifying because I’m an Aries and I have a very vengeful spirit. So the fact that—
Errin:
The petty…the center for petty in journalism and democracy.
Nikole:
Right. So, you know, when I decided I wasn’t going to go to UNC Chapel Hill, and I was going to go to Howard, and that I was going to raise $25 million to build a Center for Journalism and Democracy, you know, this was 2021. We had just had a pivotal election, and much like you I was just distressed that our profession had failed. So I wanted to come to Howard and build two things. One, understanding Black journalists have always been historically informed. This has just been embedded in the work that we do. And so, wanting to come to Howard and train new generations of Black journalists, to be investigative reporters, to do accountability reporting, to do the type of historically informed investigative reporting that is critical to democracy. And then we have external, which is trying to tell our profession that you actually do have to take a stance on democracy.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
That this idea of neutrality is impossible because you cannot have a free press if you don’t have democracy. And so, if there’s anything that we cannot be neutral on, it is democracy.
Errin:
Democracy.
Nikole:
And I wanted to say, like, we don’t actually, many of us, including myself, um, are not prepared for the moment that we’re in. So we need to read the folks who can tell us, “This is what happens when a country starts losing democracy. These are the steps of authoritarianism. This is what we’re seeing on the local level.” And so I’m trying to also then inform our profession and say, “Let’s have some humility and let’s learn from the experts,” so that we can come into our mandate, which is to safeguard the press. Anything else we might wanna do as journalists, any other value we might have as journalists is irrelevant if we don’t have a free society.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
We cannot practice our trade if we don’t have a free society.
Errin:
Hello? None of the rest of it matters, nothing, if we do not have that foundational part of who we are as a country. I know that your students are learning so much from you, but I wonder what you can say about what you have learned from them so far?
Nikole:
Uh, a lot. You know, it’s… my favorite day of the week is Mondays. That’s my teaching day. That’s when I get to sit in conversation. And that’s how my classes are. It’s conversation. I’m not the instructor-on-high who’s just lecturing them on what I think they should know. Young people, of course, have so much to offer in how they process the world, how they see what’s happening, what are their concerns. Young people are the ones who lead movements. It’s not damn-near-50-year-olds like us, you know? It’s like, I got a mortgage! Listen, we don’t…
Errin:
Yeah. No, we’re not…
Nikole:
We’re invested in these systems, which really, to me, mitigates our radical vision that we had when we were 20 years old or 18 years old. But when you’re in a classroom with students that age, it’s like you still see the possibility of what has gotten beaten out of some of us over time.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Nikole:
That they can look at the world and it’s very clear: it shouldn’t be like this.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
So that’s what I get from my students is, you know, they keep, in me, that outrage going — that we should not accept the society that we have. And the new vision for where we’re going to go is not gonna come from us. It’s going to come from them. So how can we give them the tools that allow them to manifest the future that they’re going to build? So I just love it, and it’s just fun.
Errin:
Yeah. Yeah. And what a community to be in, especially in a consequential election year like this. I mean, I know teaching in an election year is…It is inspiring, right? Because you can be a journalist out on the campaign trail talking to people who are jaded, frankly, about our democracy, about the direction of this country. And then you go into a classroom full of 18-year-olds, or people who may be literally voting for president for the first time, and they are…their perspective is so different, and their energy is so different. And what they are expecting — demanding, really — of our democracy, it’s just an entirely different perspective that feels very important and just a very different experience, as a journalist who gets to talk about our democracy and where it is going. I think the last thing that I would ask you then, is, you know, on the other side of this election, what do you hope for our profession in terms of what we were able to say about this country in this moment?
Nikole:
You know, I don’t know. Honestly, I’m having a hard time right now even thinking too far out into the future. Everything feels so unstable.
Errin:
Yeah.
Nikole:
So up for grabs. How many newsroom jobs will there even be in six months? How much democracy will there be in eight months? Ten months? You know, it’s actually a very hard time to think about the future for me. So I think I’m spending mostly that, you know, I spend my time thinking about the past and thinking about like, “What’s the work right in front of me?” Because I fear we’re not gonna figure this out, and that for a lot of people, there’s gonna be hell to pay. That’s all I could say.
Errin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, my hope is that we tell the truth because I don’t think that there was enough of that that happened in 2020. In 2016, even. And I would hope that we have learned that lesson heading into this year.
Nikole:
That’s big hope.
Errin:
But, yeah. It’s a big hope.
Nikole:
A worthy hope.
Errin:
Well, thank you for stopping by The Amendment, Nikole. I appreciate you so much. I appreciate the work that you are doing to amend the truth that we are telling in this profession and what you are doing to help the next generation that will be continuing to amend the story that we tell about our democracy. So thank you.
Nikole:
Thank you. Thank you for everything that you do, and congratulations on the launch of your new podcast. I hope people will listen in. You’re always incisive and we gotta talk more about that asterisk.
Errin:
Listen to Nikole, people.
Errin:
So if you’re new to The 19th News, you may not know that there is an asterisk in our logo. Our newsroom is named for The 19th Amendment, which guaranteed some — but not all — women the right to vote. The asterisk, though, is something that was actually my idea. We added it to the logo in recognition of the Black women who, frankly, fought shoulder-to-shoulder with White women and were thrown under the bus on their way to accessing the franchise. It would actually be another half-century before Black women, Latinas, Asian American women, Indigenous women who were not even recognized as citizens to get their full access to the ballot with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So, we have an asterisk there as a reminder that our work is far from finished. It is a way for us to keep thinking about who remains unseen and unheard in our democracy, and to bring them into the conversation and to bring them into our politics.
So in the spirit of our logo’s asterisk, each week I’m gonna give you my asterisk on the news. Examples of that could be stories that are lacking a lens on race or gender — and there are many. Undercovered stories, and then maybe stuff that you’ve seen even in my social media that I want to kind of point out and amplify. So, you heard Nikole talking about her “why” in terms of why she does the work that she does. And I thought that maybe this week’s asterisk could be to hear from me about my “why.” Why did I wanna be a journalist?
I am somebody who really was raised with a pretty strong sense of right and wrong, and fairness. And that came from my mom, who also is somebody who voted in every single election, and dragged me and my brother with her when she did that because she raised us as a single parent, and who else was gonna watch us while she was at the polls casting her ballot? But what that taught me, from a very early age, was that voting was something that grownups did. It was something that Black people did. It was something that Black women did. And that is something that I think I carry with me into this work to this day, and something I thought about over the course of my career — that Black women participate in their communities and in their democracy in that way.
And so my journalism is really just an extension of that for me, and really wanting to bring along all the Black women that I’ve known in my life into the places and spaces that they don’t necessarily get to go, but that I get the privilege to go to on their behalf, and tell people what happened and why it really matters.
You know, as we start this podcast, this is the fourth year of The 19th. I don’t know if all of you know that, so happy belated birthday to us, but we started this newsroom because we wanted to tell a different story about our politics, about our democracy, about who gets to participate in that democracy. And so that is really what I hope everybody listening to this experiences from this episode, from future episodes. And really this platform is a way for us, together, to really explore what our democracy looks like now, how we are thinking about what it means when people say that this country is or is not headed in the right direction. And for us to get kind of really past the stats of our politics, and really focus on the stakes of our politics, is the goal of this work that we do with and for all of you every week. So thank you so much for helping me, and for helping us at The 19th continue to expand the asterisk in our democracy. I’m so grateful.
So that’s my asterisk for this week, and that is this week’s episode of The Amendment. Thank you for listening. And if you’re looking for more information about The 19th, who we are, how we got our start, where we have yet to go, a documentary about us called Breaking the News will premiere on Monday, February 19th at 10:00 PM Eastern on PBS channels across the country. Come for my hairstyles, stay for the journalism. You can tune in on your own schedule for free for 90 days on the PBS app and PBS YouTube channel, or check your local PBS listings to watch it live.
For The 19th News in Wonder Media Network, I’m Errin Haines. Talk to you again next week.
The Amendment is a co-production of The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. It is executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar, and Faith Smith. Our head of development is Emily Rudder. Julia B. Chan is The 19th’s Editor-in-Chief. The Amendment is edited by Jenny Kaplan, Grace Lynch and Emily Rudder, and was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch, Brittany Martinez and Taylor Williamson with production assistance from Luci Jones, artwork by Aria Goodman. Special thanks to The 19th’s Clarice Bajkowski, Julie Bogen, Lance Dixon, Vanessa Gregorchik, and Wynton Wong plus Wonder Media Network’s Michele Dale for their work in getting us here. Our theme music was composed by JLin. I love my theme music.
