The Marshall Project: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, 2024

Our eighth annual diversity report. Find previous years’ reports here.

In 2024, The Marshall Project’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee worked to expand the gender and race categorizations for this report. After listening to staff who felt they were underrepresented by the EEOC data we collect at hiring, we felt it was important to expand the language we use to better tell the story of diversity on staff.

For the past eight years, The Marshall Project has documented its efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. While we are proud of the progress we have achieved each year, we know the work is far from over. We also share highlights from our forward-looking goals for our leadership and staff.

Our Progress in 2024

The data that follow are based on EEOC categories collected at hiring. See the next section for our efforts to expand race and gender data collection.

Our staff continued another year of growth, with The Marshall Project making 13 new hires across all departments. Among those:

• 6 (or 46%) described themselves as people of color.
  • 1 identified as Black or African American.
  • 3 identified as Asian.
  • 2 identified as two or more races.

Our permanent, full-time staff now consists of 82 individuals.

• 45 staff members (or 55% of staff) identify as people of color. Among those:

  • 12 (or 14.6% of total staff) identify as Asian or Asian American.
  • 20 (or 24.4 % of total staff) identify as Black or African American.
  • 6 (or 7% of total staff) identify as Latino or Hispanic.
  • 7 (or 8.5% of total staff) identify as two or more races.
  • 1 person did not report their race or ethnicity information.

• 47 individuals (or 57% of total staff) identify as female, 33 (or 40% of total staff) as male, and two (or 2.4% of total staff) as nonbinary.

• 5 staff members (or 6%) are formerly incarcerated.

While we’ve worked over the past few years to increase the diversity of our staff overall, we have also increased diversity among editors, who shape our coverage, and managers, who shape our daily operations and support decision-making.

• The newsroom currently has 24 editors, 13 of whom identify as people of color.
• The newsroom has 19 managers (many of whom are also editors), 9 of whom identify as people of color.
• On the business side, we have 8 managers, 6 of whom identify as people of color.

We continued working with the Dow Jones News Fund internship program to identify and support a more diverse slate of summer intern candidates. The interns selected for 2024 worked with our audience and data teams. Their clips and work products were expansive and often collaborative. Their opportunities ranged from producing engaging, explanatory social videos, to analyzing our newsletter portfolio, supporting a reporter’s interview of a man on death row, as well as contributing data analysis to our investigation about drug testing during childbirth. In 2025, we will again participate in the program for both teams. The Marshall Project proudly exceeds the minimum hourly pay required for interns in the program.

An ongoing priority for our organization is to increase the percentage of multimedia freelancers from historically underrepresented backgrounds. This year, we updated our method of reporting The Marshall Project’s data about multimedia freelancers. We now count the number and percentage of individual freelancers we engaged with — not including repeat freelance contributions — and also the percentage of the multimedia team assignment budget that went to self-identified people of color.

In 2024, 71% of freelancers hired by the multimedia team were self-identified people of color. Those freelancers utilized 74% of the multimedia team’s assignment budget for the year. In addition, 50% of freelancers were female, 41% were male, 3% were non-binary, and 1% was a Two-Spirit woman.

In our surveys for multimedia freelancers, we had a 94% response rate for race/ethnicity and a 96% response rate for gender.

Our work in 2024

Expanding the demographics categories for this report

In 2024, some members of our staff highlighted that the race and gender categories we report to the EEOC don’t fully reflect the diversity of The Marshall Project. Our DEI committee’s co-chairs consulted with our Styles and Standards Editor and with Human Resources to select more expansive race and gender categories, which then went out in an all-staff survey.

The survey added the race/ethnicity categories “East Asian or Asian American,” “Middle Eastern or Arab American” and “South Asian or Indian American.” We also provided text fields for staff to more fully describe their race/ethnicity and gender identities if desired.

We’re viewing this expanded demographic survey as a pilot program. For the time being, we intend for it to supplement the EEOC data we collect at hiring rather than replace it wholesale.

Our goal was to get responses from 40 people, or about half the staff. The DEI committee was thrilled when 70 of our colleagues responded to the expanded demographic survey.

Here are some highlights from the expanded survey:

• When given the opportunity to choose more specific categories, 7% of respondents identified as East Asian or Asian American, and 6% as South Asian or Indian American.

• Additionally, although the EEOC data reports two members of staff as nonbinary, the expanded survey found four staff who identified as nonbinary, and two additional respondents chose “other.” Those six people represent about 9% of respondents.

• All six respondents who chose “Two or More” races added detail in the follow-up text response field, with responses including “Middle Eastern and White,” “mixed race / Black, Asian, Latina from the Caribbean” and “My grandmother was Indian.” One respondent who identified as White wrote, “It's not on the list, but I consider my ethnicity to be Jewish.”

• No respondents provided detailed responses on gender identity.

Continuing to create an intentionally inclusive hiring process

In 2023, we began hosting a series of live webinars with hiring managers for some of our job postings. This year, we continued to expand upon that practice, offering hiring webinars for many of our open roles.

As we’ve expanded our hiring efforts, we’ve worked to create a robust and inclusive hiring process for all teams to use. To that end, we have a few core themes that we think are worth sharing and spreading:

• No ghosting: Our goal is that every job candidate gets a response from us, ideally within our estimated timeframe for that hiring process. If our process takes longer than expected, we do our best to keep candidates informed of the delays and what our next steps might be.

• All applications are read by a human — two, in fact! We do not use AI tools to screen or evaluate candidates. Our standard process is to randomize our candidate pools so that each application is read by two people before a decision is made — this helps to mitigate some of the unconscious bias that can infect a single decision-maker.

• Fewer generic cover letters, more short prompts to explore: Almost everyone hates writing cover letters and often, they may not actually help a hiring committee accurately evaluate candidates. So we’re moving many of our hires away from requiring a traditional cover letter, and instead providing prompts to help candidates tell their stories in ways that allow them to be compared to others.

Showing up across the industry

As The Marshall Project has done since its inception, one of our key goals is to model responsible news coverage of the criminal justice system — anchored in rigorous fact-finding and intensive reporting. In 2024, we continued our investment in a range of journalism events and communities, sending staff as speakers, recruiters and conference participants.

Because we’re not always hiring, it felt disingenuous to sit at a job fair booth for many of these industry events. But, we still wanted to make new friends and share feedback where we could. In partnership with the Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences (NICAR and IRE), we hosted a series of mentoring lunches, where conference-goers could meet with our team, ask questions, toss big ideas around, and receive feedback on their materials. The Marshall Project also joined the Knight Foundation and other news organizations to host a meal and gathering for journalists of color at the IRE convening in June.

We continued our support for and attendance at the national professional organizations serving journalists from historically marginalized identities and communities. These included: the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA), and NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. We also pooled our resources with other nonprofit investigative newsrooms, such as ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Grist and The Intercept, in order to sponsor at higher levels as a group. This led to sponsored mixers and social events, as well as panels and programming.

Building a strong remote culture

In 2024, we debuted a pilot program called the Virtual Welcome, to better and more quickly onboard new employees to the inner workings of The Marshall Project.

Newly hired staff gathered for two intense days over Zoom, where they met department heads and staff from around The Marshall Project and built camaraderie as a cohort of new hires.

We kept the new hire cohort going at the in-person staff retreat in May, where we hosted a new hires dinner, giving our newest additions to the team ample time to socialize and get facetime with leadership and each other.

The feedback we received was clear: the content was interesting and valuable to our new hires, but two days straight on Zoom was a lot. So, in the fall, we pivoted and recast the program and curriculum as a series of synchronous meetups.

Once a month, we gather the new hires to hear from one or two teams across the organization, and then spend the majority of the time in social breakout sessions, giving folks both the opportunity to ask questions and meet new people.

In 2024, we worked to celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of our teams and colleagues. This ranged from a virtual celebration for our original staff members, who celebrated their 10-year working anniversaries with The Marshall Project, to a digital watch party when the new season of our video series, Inside Story, debuted.

Continuing to expand our diverse audiences

One of our core strategic goals is to continue to connect more with incarcerated people, their families and others directly affected by the criminal justice system. To that end, we have increased the circulation of our print publication, News Inside. As of this writing, News Inside reaches incarcerated people in 1,604 prisons and jails in 48 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, Mexico and Panama.

Another example is our continued development of Inside Story, created and hosted by formerly incarcerated staff members to shine a light on incarceration. The series highlights impactful stories from our award-winning newsroom to inform audiences both inside and outside prison walls. The team’s work this year saw Season 2 launch on Scripps News. As of this writing, Inside Story reaches incarcerated people in 1,431 prisons and jails in 45 states and Washington, D.C.

Our Goals for Next Year

As we build the future of The Marshall Project, we expect to put significant effort into the following areas, further strengthening our foundation:

• Increased transparency of communication: As part of this endeavor, The Marshall Project team can expect an internal-facing, all-staff newsletter to debut in 2025, in addition to continuing our 2024 initiatives, including executive office hours and regular Local update meetings.

• Train and prepare staff for difficult conversations through conflict resolution training.

• Continue to provide our teams with both internal and external mentorship and support structures, such as deploying new hire buddies for every new employee and pairing staff members with coaches and mentors as part of their professional development.

By the Numbers

The Marshall Project uses EEOC race/ethnicity and gender reporting categories, abbreviating some categories in the charts for space.

Race/Ethnicity: White (Not Hispanic or Latino); Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino); Hispanic or Latino; Native American or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino); Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino); Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino); Two or More Races.

Gender: Nonbinary, Female, Male

The Marshall Project has no employees under the categories of Native American or Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.