Ryan Sorrell, the founder of The Kansas City Defender, had no formal journalism training or experience when he decided to launch a new media platform for young Black readers after the 2020 protests that followed George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
But Sorrell had done considerable research on the history of Black newspapers and groundbreaking Black journalists. Sorrell, whose previous jobs had been in digital marketing and social media, told me he was inspired by examples of Black newspapers that spurred social change, from the Chicago Defender’s role in the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural south to northern cities in the early 1900s to newspapers founded by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The Black press historically was the second most influential institution in the Black community behind the Black church,” Sorrell said. “It was really important that they had these physical buildings and those operated as community centers, essentially.”
Sorrell told me he started The Defender to follow those traditions in the age of digital media, creating an online newsroom and social media presence with the mission of advocating unabashedly for Black people across the Midwest.
We’ve told you in previous articles about how two other community-focused nonprofit newsrooms, at [LINK TK]Documented and THE CITY, take care to distinguish their journalism from advocacy or activism. That’s conventional journalism wisdom: Activism show bias, and audiences are less likely to trust news from journalists with preconceived notions about the subject matter.
The Defender, Sorrell said, rejects the idea that journalists can draw such lines.
“People question whether or not we are able to have some level of objectivity when we are also organizers. And I think it’s a good question,” he said. “We absolutely still believe in transparency. We believe in accuracy. But we think for us, it’s more transparent to be transparent about our biases than to say that we don’t have any bias whatsoever.”
The Defender’s handbook, written with support from the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, is even more emphatic: Journalistic objectivity, it says, is an “outdated and oppressive” way to think about news coverage. “We believe that the future of journalism can be found by revisiting and embracing the principles of the Radical Black Press, [which] prioritized truth-telling, community building, and resistance against oppression over the illusion of neutrality,” the handbook says.
In practice, that means The Defender is an active presence in the neighborhoods it covers, not just reporting on events but hosting grocery giveaways, clothing exchanges, hip hop concerts, poetry readings, even a basketball tournament.
“Those are very much like trust building, just as much or more so than our actual reporting,” Sorrell said. A teenager who shows up at a basketball tournament, he said, may have initially followed The Defender on Instagram only because of the event – but that’s not necessarily the end of the relationship, Sorrell said.
“Now they’re engaging with our police accountability reporting or something else,” he said.
I asked Sorrell whether The Defender follows traditional journalism rules such as seeking comment from institutions targeted in critical news stories. (The news site has standards and policies for editorial independence, donor and financial transparency, and correcting errors but does not discuss nitty-gritty reporting standards.)
In response, Sorrell told me about his first big scoop, a 2022 TikTok video of an activist who contended that Black women were going missing from a desolate street in Kansas City. (The Defender reposted the video to its official TikTok account and, in the caption, included a caveat that it was working to confirm the disappearances.)
The city’s police department, as The Washington Post later reported, quickly issued a statement refuting The Defender’s video. But a few weeks later, Sorrell’s initial reporting proved all too true when a woman who had been snatched from the street escaped from the home of a man later charged with the rape and murder of two other Black women. (The man is scheduled to be tried later this year.)
In this instance, Sorrell said he didn’t contact police before publishing the TikTok video because it would “defeat the purpose of us trying to create these new channels of public safety information outside of the police department.” And when the police department denied his initial report, Sorrell said, he felt like the refutation was an attack. “They just basically called us fake news,” he said.
Since then, Sorrell said, he has contacted Kansas City police spokespeople for comment on several stories. This practice aligns more closely with guidance from The Marshall Project, a leading nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal justice system. The Defender also recently hired its first staff member with traditional journalism experience.
But Sorrell continues to believe his newspaper had a different purpose than just reporting on what powerful institutions have to say.
“The perspective that’s missing more times than that is the people on the ground, the people in the community, families,” he said. “We elevate those perspectives.”