The Digiday Podcast

After the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in May 2020, many journalism outlets and journalists spent time reckoning with how the news industry could improve its coverage for Black people. Among those journalists was Lauren Williams, who was editor-in-chief and svp of Vox Media’s news property Vox.com at the time.  Williams and a former colleague Akoto Ofori-Atta — then-managing editor of non-profit news outlet The Trace — decided to leave their respective newsrooms to form their own, Capital B, a nonprofit news organization officially launched on Jan. 31 and focused on covering the news for Black people. “I do really think that, if I had gone to Jim Bankoff — who’s the CEO of Vox Media — and said, ‘I really want to do something different,’ I think he would have heard me in that moment and would have been open to discussing something. But I didn’t do that,” Williams said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. One reason Williams and Ofori-Atta opted to set off on their own is because they bel