For vs About: Reporting for Black Communities
A PANEL DISCUSSION ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF BLACK REPRESENTATION IN NEWSROOMS
This event was held on May 18 from 5-6:30 PM MDT.
What is reporting for a community rather than about it? How does that reporting impact community as a whole?
We covered this and other questions during our panel, For Vs. About: Reporting for Black Communities.
Ms. Mayhem staff and representatives from the media and community leaders discussed the importance of Black representation in the newsroom on May 18, Ms. Mayhem’s one-year anniversary!
Speakers
Krystal Covington
Moderator
Krystal Covington, MBA is a national publicist and the founder of Women of Denver, a social enterprise supporting women in business. Krystal has written content for corporations, contributed to Forbes online, and ran her own magazine for two years where she featured the voices of diverse local women. She was recently announced as a Denver Business Journal 40 Under 40 award winner for 2021.
Read our Q&A with Covington here.
GREGORY MOORE
Panelist
Gregory Moore is editor in chief of Deke Digital, a Wheat Ridge-based agency that works with CEOs and top-level executives to create expert commentary that drives brand recognition and new business for companies throughout the country. Previously, he was the editor of The Denver Post from 2002 to 2016. During that time the newspaper won four consecutive Pulitzer Prizes. More recently, he has been a commentator on issues of racial equity, diversity and inclusion, the Black Lives Matter movement, the future of journalism, and policing in America. He is a trustee of the University of Denver, the Boettcher Foundation and is chairman of Polaris, the Washington, D.C.-based anti-human trafficking organization. He was on the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and was a member and former chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Before joining The Denver Post, he was the managing editor of The Boston Globe.
AMY E. BROWN
Panelist
Amy E. Brown is a Black woman, mother and community organizer committed to advancing the fight for Black liberation. Brown was born and raised in the occupied land of the Ute, Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapahoe that is widely known as Denver, where she bases her work and family. Fighting the oppression of marginalized people has motivated Brown to do meaningful work within the California State Legislature, the Sacramento City Council and other local nonprofit, grassroots, and labor organizations. In 2015, her work led her to co-found Black Lives Matter 5280, where she now serves as director of strategic development. As a single mother to her daughter, Mercy, Brown works hard to build the world that Mercy and all Black girls deserve. She balances this work by savoring every moment she can with Mercy, who embodies Black girl magic.
Chandra Thomas Whitfield
Panelist
Chandra Thomas Whitfield is an award-winning freelance multimedia journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Essence, Ebony, NBCNews.com and The Huffington Post. She recently completed a Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting Fellowship, during which she hosted and produced “In The Gap,” a podcast for In These Times magazine about how pay inequity and discrimination impacts the lives—and livelihoods—of working Black women in America. A feature story that she penned for Atlanta magazine made the Atlanta Press Club’s “Atlanta’s Top 10 Favorite Stories of the Past 50 Years” list; it is also widely credited with contributing to a change in Georgia law and a teen’s early release from a 10-year prison sentence.