A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.

I think of being a Black journalist as being pro-truth, pro-accountability and succeeding the tradition of Black journalists who have pushed the industry on what that looks like. Also, racism isn’t true. It’s false. And so as a journalist, it’s worth it to me to expose it as false, not as spite toward any one political actor.

Journalism is meant to educate the people. To do this effectively, journalists will have to equip themselves adequately.

The traditional mission of the journalist is to 1) be independent, 2) fight power on behalf of citizens. We are getting, with very few exceptions, cowards who worry about their reputation & are afraid to fight the monoculture.

A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than an hundred thousand bayonets.

In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within. If this line of reasoning is correct, how many of the journals in the world would stand the test? But who would stop those that are useless? And who should be the judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.

For a journalist to be free he has to run and own and manage a news organization.

One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.

The function of the writer and journalist is to present the truth. Latin America writers have demonstrated that to present the truth is more than an ethical posture for them because they are taking risks that may result in their exile, torture, or death. Many writers have been killed by fascist forces. Others have preferred exile and contribute to the history of their respective countries from the outside. All of them continue to construct new vocabularies that rescue memory and create something beautiful, good, and noble from pain and the most terrible conditions of human existence.

At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e.g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier.

A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false.

It’s not that we aren’t interested in photojournalism, but Africa has become a playground for photographers coming to tell the ‘truth’ about the continent and they get stuck on the ‘hopeless’ narrative. We can sculpt so much more than this.

In the true spirit of the workingmen’s press of the 1830s, the muckrakers of the early 1900s, the revolutionary press of the 1970s, we have sought to do our part to keep alive dissident alternative news and information and analysis, grounded in facts and research, and in the service of social progress...as one advanced capitalist country after another faces the resurgence of right-wing, anti-immigrant and neofascist movements, we must nurture and build progressive alliances at the city and local level, not despair or lose hope. And those of us who are journalists must keep reporting the facts, exposing the injustices, drawing the lessons of history and speaking truth to power.