Diversity Staffing Report

Many newsrooms publish a periodic public accounting of who does the reporting, so readers can weigh how representative that group is of the audiences it serves. We support that transparency, and this page is our honest version of it, written for the newsroom we actually are rather than the one a template assumes.

The honest picture

As of now, HeadLines Decoded is a newsroom of one. Our founder and Editor-in-Chief reports, writes, and edits every story published here. We will say that plainly rather than imply a masthead that does not exist. A demographic breakdown of a single person is not a staffing report, it is a description of one individual, and publishing percentages for a team we do not yet have would be a fiction. So we will not manufacture one.

What we can tell you instead

• Who leads it: editorial control and final responsibility rest with one named person, our Editor-in-Chief, listed on the Masthead.
• How the work is made: every story is reported, written, and edited by our founder, under the standards published on this site, and a person is accountable for each one.
• How we pursue range: because we cannot staff our way to every perspective, we pursue diversity through sourcing and coverage choices, described in our Diversity Policy.

What changes as we grow

We do not intend to stay a newsroom of one. Our plan is to build a contributor pipeline by partnering with university journalism programs, giving students a route to a published byline under our editorial standards and supervision. That is also how we intend to widen the range of backgrounds and lived experience in the work over time. When there is a real team to describe, we will describe it here honestly, including its make-up and the limits of the data. Until then, the most honest report we can give is this one: a newsroom of one, transparent about being one.

Tell us where we fall short

If our coverage misses a community or a perspective, that is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear through Feedback and Complaints. A small newsroom stays honest by listening.