Ryan Sorrell
Founder and Executive Editor, the Kansas City Defender
Innovating local news with the nonprofit business model
Ryan Sorrell is the founder and executive editor of the Kansas City Defender, a nonprofit site covering the Black community in its eponymous Missouri city.
He grew up in the Kansas City area and attended Loyola University Chicago. Afterward, he worked for a leading Black think tank and PR agencies, and was a founding member of the racial-justice collective Black Rainbow.
Sorrell says the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests in 2020 sparked the idea for his publication. He launched the Kansas City Defender in July 2021; it has since accumulated over 85,000 social media followers across several platforms.
Sorrell credits this success to the site’s involvement in the community. This has included events like open mic nights and town halls, with one addressing anti-Black terrorism in Missouri and Kansas schools that was attended by students and parents from over 10 districts. The site also features sections like Black Student of the Month that spotlights young people within the community “poised to be the trailblazers and visionaries of the future.”
By Bill Meincke
I was on the frontlines of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. There was a lot going on then with regard to Black America. A lot of the local media outlets were not representing the interests of Black people, and I felt that white-owned media outlets consistently dehumanized us, criminalized us, and silenced us.
It became glaringly apparent that without our own organization, infrastructure, and means of communicating within our community, it would not be possible to share Black stories.
The Trump administration had announced Operation Legend that year, a Department of Justice initiative where they would send federal agents into Kansas City to work with local police as a testing ground before expanding the program throughout the country. We organized a protest to denounce this fascist escalation of violence which we noted was the exact opposite of what our communities were demanding: less money and resources to police, more money for life-affirming resources instead.
So, we had that background of community organizing. We started off in an untraditional way by going to Kansas City’s historically Black jazz district at 18th and Vine. We took a camera to this district where there’s a lot of nightlife and young Black people at poetry events, parties, and clubs. We would go there and talk to people, record it and post it on Instagram. It ended up getting a lot of traction, and people were resonating with it.
That was how we initially got our foot in the door of the community, and young Black people connected with us. From there, we started to connect to all these types of groups, like the houseless community and civil rights organizations. We knew what people on the ground were most interested in, and what they felt was being left out of traditional media.
Reaching Out to a Younger Generation
That cultural aspect is very important, and it’s why we have been able to capture and connect with Gen Z and young people in our city.
Gen Z is interested in platforms that take stances on things like social-justice issues. The Kansas City Defender published a story written completely by Black high school students about their thoughts on white supremacist censorship in schools (that article was published with the headline “This is What Students Are Saying About White-Washed History & Censorship in Schools”). We didn’t edit the pieces at all — we just listened to what these young Black students had to say.
We started to connect to all these types of groups, like the houseless community and civil rights organizations. We knew what people on the ground were most interested in, and what they felt was being left out of traditional media.
We regularly poll readers on our coverage compared to other news outlets in our city. We hear from a lot of people saying they trust us more than any other traditional news outlet in the city. They say this because of how transparent we are about our positions. We don’t consider ourselves to be unbiased by any means, and we’re transparent about that — we don’t position ourselves as being supposedly “objective.”
Connecting with an Audience
There aren’t many Black-owned news publications in Missouri. We’re in a Black digital news desert. Inside of these Black digital news deserts across the country, you have entire communities that do not have any access to information coming from people who look like them.
We hosted a basketball tournament. We had over 200 Black men between the ages of 15 and 20 out on a Friday night just playing basketball. A lot of them didn’t even know who we were. They learned about us through that basketball tournament and then started following us, frequently engaging with our social platforms after that.
We do grocery buyouts where we go to a Black grocery store and pay for Black people’s groceries until we run out of the money from fundraising efforts.
We want to influence more news outlets to not be afraid to be a part of and engage with their communities.
Defining Community-Focused Journalism
Traditional news outlets in our city frequently take the police’s reports and accounts at face value and report them as fact; they don’t question them at all. That has been very detrimental to our community.
In March of 2021, a man named Malcolm Johnson was murdered inside of a gas station in Kansas City. Initial police reports said that he was armed and engaged in a shootout with the Kansas City Police Department. Every single news outlet reported that.
Then we come to find out through leaked security footage that not only was he unarmed, he was actually pinned to the ground by three police officers. One of the police officers accidentally shot another officer and then killed Malcolm.
I repeat that story because if we had community-focused journalism, then we wouldn’t have situations where we’re taking the police’s word and unquestioningly parroting it as facts. Traditional news outlets historically engage in the assassination of Black characters. The Kansas City Defender is attempting to resist and combat that.
We’re rethinking, reshaping, and innovating how Black people perceive journalism, what we think is necessary for our communities for justice and truth. The number one thing we are accountable to is the community. As long as we have that at the forefront of our minds and our work, then we feel good about what we’re doing.