Philadelphia · Field interview
"The numbers don't add up to work for nobody."
Volume IV — Mission
Pushing community journalism somewhere new.
All of a sudden you’ve got a neighbor committed to being your neighborly newscaster. We’re live, we’re shooting, and anyone, anywhere can watch.
The Mission
In one line
Narrative is a public good. News is a public good.
We Them Media is pushing community journalism somewhere new. The idea is, all of a sudden you’ve got a neighbor committed to being your neighborly newscaster. Businesses shutting down, people getting evicted, good deeds, accomplishments, tragedy. All of it. Right? We’re live, we’re shooting, and anyone, anywhere can watch.
The longer version: an intersectional coalition of storytellers building a global, community-funded journalism network. We’re trying to recognize and dignify the people the rest of the industry categorizes, generalizes, or ignores. Narrative is a public good. News is a public good. We’re trying to lead the world in a conversation that brings us closer.
The Community
Who we serve
The “Them” in our name is the people who get spoken about rather than spoken with.
We report from and for communities whose stories are most often told extractively, by reporters parachuted in for a beat they don’t share, or not told at all.
There’s a pattern behind that extraction. It’s colonial, neo-colonial, and corporate, and we don’t pretend it isn’t. Colonialism in particular is the biggest unwritten story of contemporary journalism. We don’t treat it as a single beat. We treat it as a lens through which other stories get reported. George Floyd needed colonial context to be told justly. Biafra needs it. Land and economic questions in Kenya carry the long shadow of British settler structures, even when the day’s news looks unrelated. Eviction in Charlotte needs colonial-and-corporate context. Most outlets leave that context out. That’s how communities end up dehumanized and decontextualized in the same breath. We don’t.
The work is led by an intersectional coalition. African leadership and diaspora leadership form the spine. White collaborators and other allied voices are part of the network on the same anti-extractive terms. Lineage matters. Race-essentialism doesn’t. The question we ask anyone joining us is whether they treat the people they’re reporting about as partners or as objects.
The network is anchored in Africa. That’s where most of our contributor base lives and where the founder has spent the most time on the ground. The immediate work is a strong proof-of-concept across Nigeria and Kenya. Show the model works, then expand. Latin America may be a later horizon. We’re not committing to a second continent before the first one is properly anchored. The English-speaking diaspora is already part of the work. Expansion comes in stages.
Our team is split across continent and diaspora. Lagos (Gift) and Abuja (Bayo) in Nigeria. Wuraola also reporting from Nigeria as our active street correspondent. Nairobi in Kenya (Aziz, Fidesio). Philadelphia (Maceo, the founder) and Charlotte (Devin) in the United States. Marissa biking across the U.S. and reporting from a different state each month. The audience we’re building toward is college-age readers, social-issue-curious people, anyone who wants to understand what’s actually happening in places they don’t live, and who wants their newscasters to feel like someone they can recognize. Wuraola is exactly that. So is everyone else on this masthead.
The work is free to access. No paywall. No advertising. The audience we earn is the audience we owe.
The Stakes
Why this matters now
We’ve been pacified into complacency.
Most Americans don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world. When we do know, we’ve been given reasons that are designed to make us feel like there’s nothing we can do about it. So we don’t. That’s pacification dressed up as helplessness.
The U.S. holds disproportionate weight on the planet. Most of us have been set up to undervalue that, because the alternative — recognizing the privilege and the agency that comes with it — would mean using it. The gap between what an American citizen could push for and what most actually do push for is one of the most expensive gaps in the world. Most of that gap is informational. People can’t take action on what they don’t see, and what gets shown to them is filtered by interests that benefit from people not seeing it.
The work We Them Media is committed to is closing the gap. We want the world to be able to say in 2030, “that’s how I knew what was going on.” That’s a ten-year arc, not a quarterly one. Most of journalism is set up for the cycle that ends today. We’re working on the cycle that ends with people having context they didn’t have, and acting differently because of it.
The audience we’re reporting from and the audience we’re reporting to aren’t the same audience. Africa and the diaspora are where the reporting comes from. The whole world is who we’re reporting to, but the U.S. specifically is where the most consequential complacency lives. So the editorial bridge is two-way on purpose.
The Model
How the journalism works
Video-first, conversation-led, on the ground.
WTM lives on the same shelf as independent host-led media — Lex Fridman, Channel 5, Zane Lowe, Afropolitan. The closest sibling is Channel 5. Where Channel 5 reports through American-male perspectives, We Them Media is global from day one. Africa, the diaspora, and the U.S. in honest conversation — not one continent’s eyes on the rest of the world. We’re not in the same lane as legacy hard-news outlets and we’re not trying to be.
The philosophy underneath the work is situated knowledge. The position, from feminist epistemology: all knowledge comes from somewhere. The “view from nowhere” mainstream journalism claims is itself a particular position pretending to be universal. Multiple situated perspectives in honest conversation produce a truer picture of the world than any one perspective claiming neutrality. WTM declares its position openly. African leadership, diaspora collaboration, an intersectional coalition reporting from where it actually lives. We don’t apologize for that. It’s a more honest starting point than objectivity pretending it has no starting point.
We don’t just cover communities. We pay people from those communities to develop their own journalism capacity. The difference between coverage and capacity-building is the model.
How it actually works: anyone can post a question to the platform and attach money to it. Storytellers with proximity to the question pick it up, report it, and earn the bounty on delivery. Quality work earns weekly tips on top of bounties. The strongest contributors at the end of each season are retained as lead voices for their regions. Funding flows through transparent onchain mechanisms (a token of patronage on Ethereum via Nouns Builder, plus a durable newsletter on Beehiiv) so readers can see what they’re paying for and contributors can see what they’re being paid in. Editorial direction is held by WTM. Not by funders. Not by token holders. Not by partners.
The coalition does the work. The conversation it produces brings the world a little closer to itself.
The Horizon
What success looks like
A self-sustaining global journalism network where the people closest to a story are the ones paid to report it.
Readers fund the work directly through transparent onchain mechanisms. The editorial standard is publicly published, publicly enforced, and publicly accountable.
By the end of 2026: a working proof-of-concept across Nigeria and Kenya. Three lead voices retained. The first season’s work published. Our funding diversified across community patronage, fellowships, and partner-aligned grants — none of which carry editorial influence. By 2027 and 2028: expansion to additional regions, decided by what the proof-of-concept teaches us about where the model travels.
If someone asks five years from now what We Them Media changed, the answer I want is reconnection. Black America back in touch with the rest of the African diaspora. Diasporic communities back in conversation with the continent. Ways of being that have been foreclosed for generations becoming visible again, not as anthropological objects but as living practice. Black Americans seeing themselves as a global people, curious about the rest of the diaspora in a new way. We’re using journalism as the vehicle for a project bigger than journalism: rejoining a people to itself across distance and time.
The bigger ambition, honestly, is to create a mirror that wouldn’t exist if we weren’t doing it. A way for the world to start to see itself differently — not just through messages funded to reach us, not just through the perspectives of people who have a stake in us not doing this. People in places that don’t even have power, getting online and on the record. That’s the work.
Erasure ends here, on the record, with credit and pay where they belong.
All of a sudden you’ve got a neighbor committed to being your neighborly newscaster.