Solidarity journalism: What it is and how to do it

A brief history of solidarity journalism

Solidarity journalism has been reframed for the 21st century to a large extent by the Solidarity Journalism Initiative, a project run by Anita Varma for the Center for Media Engagement. Varma is an assistant professor at the University of Texas and I spoke to her for this article.

But she balks at the idea that she invented solidarity journalism, and argues it is not a new concept. In fact, in many countries, the inception of free media was built on solidarity with the oppressed.

“It’s actually a long-standing historical tradition, definitely in the US and in many, many other countries where the purpose of journalism is to enact solidarity,” she tells me, insisting that solidarity is at the heart of journalism, not an alternative, progressive fringe movement. 

“On the contrary, some of the historically most award-winning, laudable journalism has had everything to do with solidarity. We can think of that in terms of very early exposés of child labour, voting rights, and more current issues related to the refugee crisis and the MeToo movement on a global scale, right? All of those types of coverage have happened at the centre of journalism.”

How do I get started? 

Solidarity journalism focuses on groups that are subjected to some kind of injustice that puts their human dignity at risk. Sometimes that can be very obvious, but in other cases it’s less clear. Something may be unfair, but not to the degree that it threatens a person’s humanity.

Varma recommends that the first step is to ask yourself what issue you want to report on. To decide whether solidarity journalism is appropriate, she suggests one quick way to understand if someone is being treated as less than human is to ask if their public safety is being put at risk. 

“I live in Texas and this is the first anniversary of the Uvalde shooting. That’s an issue of injustice that affects parents with small children who have this question of whether their children will be gunned down in schools. Their public safety is such that they cannot be confident that they can send their kids to school and that their kids will come home,” says Varma. 

Other issues could be access to water, having enough money to put food on the table, having access to shelter, living in a country not affected by war, being allowed to walk down the street and be who you are without fearing for your safety, or simply having clean air to breathe. 

The next step once you’ve decided what issue to cover, is to ask yourself where you can find people affected by that issue. Varma recommends starting with social media to try to get a sense of networks based on shared experience, or actions such as lobbying or protests. 

“That’s one way I learned much more about transgender youth and how they support each other, especially in Texas. And then from there, you try to track out in the world,” she suggests.

You don’t have to contact the entire group at once, connecting with one person is a start. It could be an email or a direct message, or showing up to a public event to introduce yourself.

Three things to do today:

• Ask what issues affect your community
• Decide which issue to cover – is a group’s basic humanity under threat?
• Connect with one person affected by that issue

How do I level up? 

Journalists tend not to be trained in history, and the newsroom mentality tends to be focused on the here and now. But seeing your work through a historical lens can help you build trust with marginalised groups and avoid parachute journalism where you drop in, report, then get out.

“It can lead to a feeling among marginalised communities that ‘these journalists are acting like this is a new problem we’re having, but it has been going on for a long time. Why don’t they know that?’ Public safety for trans youth, for example, is not an issue novel to 2023,” says Varma.

A future lens is equally important. Solidarity journalism can help audiences see that injustices are not set in stone, that there are possibilities for change, that they need not be a forever-issue.

“Journalism has always done its best work by not only exposing things like child labour, but by making it clear that there is no inherent necessity that these conditions continue, and galvanising efforts to address that injustice. That’s not biased. That’s public service,” says Varma.

Playing the long game also means eschewing short-term metrics such as traffic, instead defining success in terms of impact or trust, which could be measured through for example audience surveys. Varma says that audience evaluation of accuracy tends to increase.

Solidarity journalism is reliant on relationship-building, so another way to level up your solidarity journalism (and to measure its success) is to keep growing your sourcing network. A large network of sources will improve your journalism and indicate that it’s working, because marginalised groups see your coverage as a space where their issues are addressed.

And here’s the good news: you might already be practising solidarity journalism. 

Many newsrooms are reluctant to label their journalism as such, out of fear of surrendering neutrality to advocacy, but are in fact already doing a lot of reporting that centres marginalised groups. Varma argues that some of the best solidarity reporting often comes from bigger newsrooms, and is often the journalism most likely to win major journalism awards.

Three things to do next:

• If an issue isn’t new, don’t pretend it is
• Reframe your idea of measuring success
• Apply for awards – validation will help you build a case for solidarity journalism in your newsroom

Pitfalls – mistakes to avoid

If you’re covering a marginalised group, make sure you interview people from that group, not just the government minister who makes decisions on them, or the academic who researches them.

“If I want to know about Haley’s Comet, I should talk to someone with a PhD in Haley’s Comet. But if I want to know about what’s happening in a homeless shelter, I should really go to the homeless shelter, right? That’s a different level of expertise on the ground than someone who has studied shelters since 1981. I’m sure they have something to say, but is it totally going to capture what’s going on in that particular case? I would be doubtful,” says Varma.

The point of solidarity journalism is to centre marginalised groups in order to fuel action for solutions – it may spark emotions, but that’s not the end goal. It is not poverty porn. It doesn’t primarily invite audiences to empathise, instead it invites collective action against injustices.

An example of well-intended reporting that is not solidarity journalism is a story that asks council officials, academics or charity bosses what they think should be done about homelessness, and asks homeless people how they feel about their situation. Solidarity journalism asks people affected by an issue for their thoughts on change; it doesn’t extract their emotional pain.

“Asking people, what do you think, what do you need, what do you want to see happen? These are all questions that journalists are very prone to asking politicians when something happens in their jurisdiction, but they’re much less likely to ask people on the ground,” says Varma.

“I think that to the same extent that it would be odd to ask a politician ‘how do you feel today’ it should be equally odd not to ask people impacted what it is that they need, because what ends up happening is that either it becomes a very negative narrative or you write from the official standpoint or an NGO standpoint who leap in with ‘here, we know what they need’.”

We mentioned starting by connecting with one person, but don’t let it stop there. Solidarity journalism covers systemic injustices, not one person affected by an unfairness. Similarly, one person cannot be a spokesperson for an entire community; you need multiple perspectives. Interviewing just one person risks being an individual profile, not solidarity journalism.

Three things not to do:

• Ignore the affected community
• Ask people with titles about their thoughts and marginalised groups about their feelings
• Make one person stand in for an entire group

Where can I find out more?

The Solidarity Journalism Initiative helps improve coverage of marginalised communities and includes hands-on guides to solidarity reporting, questions to ask in interviews and so on.

Here’s Anita Varma’s 2022 article for the NiemanLab’s annual New Year’s predictions.

Here’s a list of examples of solidarity journalism.

There are plenty of examples of solidarity journalism that isn’t labelled as such, including from newsrooms that don’t generally do solidarity journalism. Here’s one from Teen Vogue.

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