Media2070 and Vision25:Building Racial Equity come together to discuss pay exploitation in the news industry and to imagine a more equitable future in newsrooms.

Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, will be joined by Alicia Bell and Diamond Hardiman of Media2070, an organization that earlier this year exposed the daily struggle for fair wages through their documentary on Black journalist Elizabeth Montgomery, who struggled to "pay rent or buy groceries" on the salary she received working for a major U.S. newsroom.

The conversation strives to address newsroom strategies for pay equity as a follow up to individualized scope of the Vision25 SRCCON session, "A Playbook of Pay Equity Comebacks: Scripts to use when people make excuses for not implementing pay transparency."

We hope to lastly imagine the incredible organizing and reporting journalists could accomplish if all were given fair wages and resources. The sentiment was echoed in the first episode of Vision25 Belonging in the News featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones, who said, "The 1619 Project would not exist if I was not being treated as if I belonged in the newsroom. You have to treat me as an equal who is worth investing in.”

Media 2070 is a project of Free Press, a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan organization fighting for your rights to connect and communicate.

The group advocates for media institutions to make reparations to the Black community and for regulators and lawmakers to make reparations for policies that have baked inequities into our media system.

The Online News Association, OpenNews and the Maynard Institute have come together to create Vision25: Building Racial Equity in Newsrooms, a catalyst in a social change movement that seeks to build journalistic institutions where newsrooms are actively anti-racist and collaborative, and journalists of color feel like they truly belong. Learn more here.

Pay Equity Series: Part Two with Media 2070