The Marshall Project: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, 2025

This is our ninth annual diversity report. Find previous years’ reports here.

For the past nine years, The Marshall Project has documented its efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. While we are proud of the progress we have achieved, we know there’s more work ahead. This report includes highlights from the past year and goals for our leadership and staff.

In 2025, The Marshall Project’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee continued an effort to expand the gender and race categorizations for this report. The initiative began in 2024, after listening to staff who felt they were underrepresented by the mandatory U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data we collect at hiring. We believe it’s important to continue collecting expanded data to better tell the story of diversity on staff.

Our progress in 2025

The data that follows is based on EEOC categories collected at hiring. See the next section for our efforts to expand race and gender data collection.

The Marshall Project made 8 new hires across all departments in 2025. Among those:

• 3 (or 38%) described themselves as people of color.

  • 2 (or 25%) identified as Black or African American.

  • 1 identified as Latino or Hispanic.

Our permanent, full-time staff now consists of 75 individuals.

• 38 staff members (51% of staff) identify as people of color. Among those:

  • 8 (or 11% of total staff) identify as Asian or Asian American.

  • 20 (or 27% of total staff) identify as Black or African American.

  • 5 (or 7% of total staff) identify as Latino or Hispanic.

  • 5 (or 7% of total staff) identify as two or more races.

  • 1 person did not report their race or ethnicity information.

• 43 individuals (or 57% of total staff) identify as female, 30 (or 40% of total staff) as male, and two (or 3% of total staff) as nonbinary.

• 4 staff members (or 5%) are formerly incarcerated.

Here are the figures about editors, who shape our coverage, and managers, who shape our daily operations and support decision-making.

• The newsroom currently has 20 editors, 10 of whom identify as people of color.
• The newsroom has 14 managers (many of whom are also editors), 6 of whom identify as people of color.
• On the business side, we have 7 managers, 6 of whom identify as people of color.

We continued working with the Dow Jones News Fund internship program to identify and support summer intern candidates. The interns selected for 2025 worked with our audience engagement and data teams. Their opportunities ranged from working on our newsletters and audience research to reporting on federal cuts to community justice programs. The Marshall Project proudly exceeds the minimum hourly pay required for interns in the program.

An ongoing priority for our organization is to increase opportunities for multimedia freelancers, including those from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Since 2024, we updated our method of reporting The Marshall Project’s data about multimedia freelancers. We now count the number and percentage of individual freelancers we engaged with — not including repeat freelance contributions.

In 2025, 76% of freelancers hired by the multimedia team were self-identified people of color. In addition, 58% of freelancers were female, 40% were male, and 1% preferred not to say.

In our survey of multimedia freelancers, we had a 93% response rate.

Our work in 2025

Using expanded demographic categories in this report

In 2024, some members of our staff highlighted that the race and gender categories we report to the EEOC don’t fully reflect the diversity of The Marshall Project. Our DEI committee’s co-chairs consulted with our Styles and Standards Editor and with Human Resources to select more expansive race and gender categories, which then went out in an all-staff survey. We repeated that survey in 2025.

The survey added the race/ethnicity categories “East Asian or Asian American,” “Middle Eastern or Arab American” and “South Asian or Indian American.” We also provided text fields for staff to more fully describe their race/ethnicity and gender identities if desired.

For the time being, we intend for the expanded survey to continue to supplement the EEOC data collected at hiring rather than replace it wholesale.

Participation in the expanded demographic survey is voluntary. We received responses from 58 of our colleagues (or 77% of the staff).

Here are some highlights from the expanded survey:

• When given the opportunity to choose more specific categories, 5% of respondents identified as East Asian or Asian American, and 3% as South Asian or Indian American.
• The data collected at hiring for the EEOC reported 2 members of staff as nonbinary. In the expanded survey, 3 staff identified as nonbinary, and 1 additional respondent chose “other.” Those 4 people represent about 7% of respondents in the expanded survey.
• Several colleagues added detail about their race identity in a follow-up text response field, with responses including “Asian American and White,” “Black or African American/Non-Hispanic White,” “Middle Eastern/Arab American and White,” “I consider my ethnicity to be Jewish” and “My grandmother was Indian, so I am a mixture of Caucasian and Indian.”
• In the gender identity follow-up question, 1 respondent said they “identify as a trans nonbinary person.”

Continuing to create an intentionally inclusive hiring process

We have hosted webinars with hiring managers for some of our job postings. The webinars have allowed applicants an opportunity to ask questions about our open positions and our organization.

We’ve expanded our hiring efforts to ensure an inclusive hiring process throughout our organization. To that end, we have a few core themes that we think are worth sharing and spreading:

• No ghosting: Our goal is that every job candidate gets a response within our estimated timeframe for that hiring process. If our process takes longer than expected, we do our best to keep candidates informed of the delays and what our next steps might be.
• Applications are read by a human — at minimum two, in fact! We do not use AI tools to screen or evaluate candidates. Our standard process is to randomize our candidate pools so that each application is read by at least two people before a decision is made — this helps to mitigate some of the subconscious bias that can infect a single decision-maker.
• Less emphasis on generic cover letters, depending on the job: Many people hate writing cover letters, and in some cases, they may not be as helpful in accurately evaluating candidates. So we’re continuing to use a mix of cover letters and other short prompts — depending on the specific position — to help candidates tell their stories in ways that allow them to be compared to others.

Showing up across the industry

As The Marshall Project has done since its inception, one of our key goals is to model responsible news coverage of the criminal justice system — anchored in rigorous fact-finding and intensive reporting. In 2025, we continued our investment in a range of journalism events and communities, sending staff as speakers, recruiters and conference participants.

Because we’re not always hiring, it felt disingenuous to sit at a job fair booth for many of these events. But, we still wanted to make new friends and share feedback where we could. In partnership with the Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences (NICAR and IRE), we hosted a series of mentoring lunches or meet-ups, where conference-goers could meet our team, ask questions, toss big ideas around, and receive feedback on their materials. The Marshall Project also joined other news organizations to host a networking event for journalists of color at the IRE convening in June.

We continued our support and attendance at national professional organizations, including: the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), and NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. We also pooled our resources with other nonprofit investigative newsrooms, such as ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Grist and The Intercept, in order to sponsor at higher levels as a group. This led to sponsored mixers and social events, as well as panels and programming.

Continuing to expand our audiences

One of our core strategic goals is to continue to connect more with incarcerated people, their families and others directly affected by the criminal justice system. To that end, we have increased the circulation of our print publication, News Inside. As of this writing, News Inside reaches incarcerated people in 2,167 prisons and jails in 48 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, Mexico and Panama.

Another example is our continued development of Inside Story, created and hosted by formerly incarcerated staff members to shine a light on incarceration. The series highlights impactful stories from our award-winning newsroom to inform audiences both inside and outside prison walls. As of this writing, Inside Story reaches incarcerated people in 1,728 prisons and jails in 45 states and Washington, D.C.

Staff training

In 2025, some of our staff completed a two-session conflict resolution training that furthered foundational understandings of how different types of conflict can arise in a growing news organization. The sessions helped our staff better identify points of conflict, along with frameworks, methods, and tools to better navigate difficult conversations and feedback in the workplace.

Our Goals for Next Year

As we build the future of The Marshall Project, we expect to put significant effort into the following areas, further strengthening our foundation:

• Increased transparency of communication: In 2025, we debuted an internal-facing, all-staff newsletter, which we plan to continue in 2026. Other ongoing initiatives include regular executive office updates and Local update meetings.
• Continue to provide our teams with both internal and external mentorship and support structures, such as deploying new hire buddies for every new employee and pairing staff members with coaches and mentors as part of their professional development.

By the Numbers

The Marshall Project uses EEOC race/ethnicity and gender reporting categories, abbreviating some categories in the charts for space.

Race/Ethnicity: White (Not Hispanic or Latino); Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino); Hispanic or Latino; Native American or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino); Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino); Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino); Two or More Races.

Gender: Nonbinary, Female, Male

The Marshall Project has no employees under the categories of Native American or Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.