Here’s what you miss by only talking to white men about the digital revolution and journalism

[Commentary] Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on The Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Nieman Journalism Lab launched Riptide, a new project about the disruption of journalism by technology.

The project bills itself as an “oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, from 1980 to the present.” But looking at the final product and their list of sources, it appears that the project misses a key aspect of how the digital age disrupted traditional journalism: Digital advances, particularly the spread of the Internet and the rise of blogging, gave a powerful new way for voices marginalized in the elite journalism sphere to spread their stories. Jeanne Brooks, the digital director of nonprofit group the Online News Association, counted just five white women, two men of color, and zero women of color among 61 people interviewed for the project. All three of the project’s authors are also white men. That’s a 100 percent white male group using 90 percent white male perspective on the changes in journalism field and calling it a defining narrative.