OFF-MUTE 🔈
📉 Public trust in the media is at an all-time low…
📈 …while misinformation and polarization continue to rise.
🔢 People are hungry for facts to make better decisions and to feel connected to their communities.
📰 However, local papers are shutting down left and right or shrinking newsrooms to stay afloat (this is an age-old struggle that’s worsened amid the pandemic).
💥 And it's one of our biggest threats to democracy!
🖼️ But there’s a new era of journalism on the horizon.
🌱 All kinds of independent media groups are sprouting up to close the news gap.
✨ Our #client, The Markup, is one of these nonprofit media companies investigating how technology is reshaping society.
🔎 They investigate Big Tech inequities to help inform their readers about the technology used in our everyday lives. And then they build and deliver public data tools that help readers investigate these inequities long after their initial investigative stories are published. Cool, right?
🎙️ We sat down with Nabiha Syed, The Markup’s president and prominent first amendment rights lawyer who previously held positions at Buzzfeed and New York Times, to learn more.
Who are your readers/subscribers? What types of stories are they hungry for?
Syed: Our readers are people who generally know that technology isn't working for all of us, but they don't always know exactly how. We fill that gap.
We are watchdogs for Big Tech—the companies you've heard of, like Amazon and Facebook—but also the tech you haven't heard about yet. For example, the family safety app, Life360, sells users’ data and universities’ student risk algorithms are filtering Black students out of STEM majors. Folks are hungry to know more about how this technology works, and we’re here to give them that information.
People with a lot of technological expertise love that we disclose our methodologies and datasets with our investigations, inviting others to interrogate our work. People who want to be able to make informed, consumer choices appreciate our tools like Amazon Brand Detector, a browser plug-in that reveals what brands on Amazon are actually owned by Amazon under another name, not small businesses. Another example of that "journalism-as-a-service" approach includes something like Blacklight, which three million people have used, to understand what data is being collected about them when they visit any website. Our audience wants to know more about how the world around them really works, especially when it comes to our lives online, and we're thrilled to give that to them.
How do your investigations work? Is there a recent example you’re most proud of?
Syed: Our investigations are deep dives into how a particular type of tech reshapes society, whether that's mortgage algorithms, tenant screening algorithms, or student risk algorithms. In simple terms, we want to uncover those technologies that are invisible drivers of our everyday needs—where we live, who we work for, what educational opportunities are available. I'm incredibly proud of our series on education technology, which reveals the way that classroom software (including application software!) is collecting and selling data about students and families.
What is The Markup's role in society?
Syed: We launched The Markup at a moment where people do not always trust the press! Institutional press have largely overlooked issues related to communities of color or reported them from a very particular "objective" lens that ignores lived reality (think of police brutality, for example). I come from a community of color that has been represented in problematic ways, so I know this closely. And that's why, at The Markup, we focus on trust—we think about trust-building at every step of our process. In our reporting, that often means having experts weigh in on our methodologies and really help shape our analysis. In our audience outreach, that means really listening to where people are coming from, and creating opportunities for "Ask The Markup" so we can answer questions directly. And in our business, we embody trust by refusing to track our readers and investing in tracker-free business tools that we'll be making available to the public soon.