By Anthea Kasonga
The theme for Black History Month UK in 2025 is “Standing Firm in Power and Pride”. Here, power means three things: who commissions, who edits, who decides what runs.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 factsheet finds that across five markets only 17 per cent of top editors are people of colour. In the UK sample there are none, and the share of UK users who say they read at least one major outlet with a top editor of colour is zero. This lands in a month where Reach plc, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, proposed 321 editorial redundancies and 135 new roles, a net loss of 186. These conditions shape what is commissioned, who is quoted, and which stories make it past the desk.
Looking just below the mastheads, the pipeline is not much wider. The NCTJ’s Journalists at Work 2024 reports that 91 per cent of UK journalists are white. Ofcom’s 2023/24 EDI report shows people from minority ethnic groups hold 11 per cent of senior management roles in broadcasting, with a revolving-door pattern for joiners and leavers. When decision-makers do not reflect the public, blind spots are not accidental. They are a system output.
What this means for coverage
When local knowledge disappears with job cuts, quick news leans harder on police lines and official notices. Under time pressure, the risk of poor headlines and framing rises. When commissioning is tight, stories about Black lives skew towards episodic harm, while policy and civic expertise are harder to place. Malice is not required. A thin pipeline and a shallow bench will do it.
There is a human story behind the statistics. In June 2024, Ade Onibada described being made redundant and moving into adjacent work that still utilises her journalism skills in Refinery29 Unbothered UK. That speaks to resilience, and it also tells you who finds space to do the work inside mainstream newsrooms and who does not. When Black-led spaces close or are sidelined, the loss is cultural as well as professional. Jobs are not the only thing lost; angles, sources and editorial memory are too.
Local pipelines, real reach
One important aspect of counterbalancing the media landscape is the emergence of local and Black-led media that operate independently of traditional commissioning schedules. Across the UK, a growing number of these media outlets are creating their own channels and determining their own agendas. Ofcom’s small-scale DAB expansion, with its eighth and final licensing round opening in September 2025 and further multiplex licences awarded, along with the Community Radio Order 2025, is lowering technical barriers for community radio. Additionally, newsletters, podcasts, and membership models are reducing commercial barriers.
This movement includes youth-led broadcasters like Reprezent Radio, long-established Black newsrooms such as The Voice, and membership-based publishers like Black Ballad, as well as culture-focused publications with a civic mission like The British Blacklist. Together, they diversify coverage beyond the mainstream national media and bring to life this year’s Black History Month theme: empowerment through owning communication channels and pride in setting the agenda. These are working channels that keep stories present even when larger publishers are cutting the roles that would carry them.
This also connects with MDI’s recent conversation with Gary Younge on Diversity Matters, when he warned that “diversity” can become what Angela Davis termed, the “difference that brings no difference,” when power does not shift: He urged editors to resist the normalisation of what should still shock us. The practical tests are simple: who assigns, who edits, who can say “run it”, and who is present when harm is framed. You can hear the episode here: “Diversity Under Attack”.
If you want a practical reading of “power and pride”, it is this. Power is leadership that can see the whole audience and is accountable for progression, not only hiring. It means keeping doors open, even when spreadsheets suggest closing them, because those doors become tomorrow’s judgement on difficult stories. Pride is not a month-long theme. It is the choice to work with community outlets year-round, to co-publish where audiences overlap, and to treat community distribution as part of core journalism. The 2025 policy environment has lowered technical barriers. The rest is editorial will.
The data suggests the UK is moving the wrong way at the top. The workforce beneath remains overwhelmingly white. This year’s most significant restructuring removed many posts that carry local knowledge into national reporting. At the same time, the pathways that under-served outlets rely on have become a little more robust.
That presents a real choice for newsrooms: widen who gets to say “run it” and invest in the channels that carry those decisions to readers and listeners or accept that representation and audience development will keep happening elsewhere.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Media Diversity Institute. Any question or comment should be addressed to [email protected] of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI).
