The 19th

What you're reading

The 19th* (the asterisk references the unratified 19th Amendment provisions that excluded women of color from full voting rights) is a US nonprofit newsroom founded in 2020 by Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora, both formerly of The Texas Tribune. It is headquartered with no single physical office (distributed staff) and covers the intersection of gender, race and public policy with a specific focus on women, LGBTQ+ people and communities of color.

Coverage spans politics (women in elected office, reproductive rights legislation, family-policy debates), the economy (the care economy, the gender pay gap, child care policy, family leave), health (maternal mortality, reproductive health access, transgender healthcare policy), and education. The newsroom publishes at 19thnews.org and through a robust republishing partnership program that puts 19th* bylines in mainstream outlets including the AP, NBC News, USA Today and many regional papers. Staff runs around 50 journalists. Audience is concentrated in policymakers, advocates and a politically-engaged readership focused on gender-and-policy issues.

Ownership & funding

The 19th News (nonprofit). Funded primarily through nonprofit.

Nonprofit funding through foundations (Knight, MacArthur, Ford, Pivotal Ventures and others), individual donors and corporate sponsorships removes commercial-ad pressure and lets the newsroom commit to coverage areas (child care policy, maternal health, gender-based legislative tracking) that have no obvious advertising market. The model rewards depth on a narrow but substantively important topic set rather than breadth across all news. Trade-off: structural dependence on continued foundation support, and standard donor-coverage questions partly mitigated by transparent funder disclosure. The republishing partnerships amplify reach far beyond what the 19thnews.org site's direct traffic could deliver alone.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The 19th at Lean Left with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places The 19th at Lean Left because the newsroom's mission, beat selection and framing are explicitly oriented around topics that progressive politics has positioned itself to advocate on — reproductive rights, transgender healthcare, the care economy, women's electoral representation, LGBTQ+ legal protections, paid family leave. The implicit policy framing across coverage treats expansive reproductive-rights access, gender-affirming care, paid family leave and family-policy expansion as the reference points. The publication does not claim to be down-the-middle on these issues; the mission is to cover them seriously, which is itself a coverage choice that is recognizably center-left.

Where the pattern breaks: the 19th has done sustained reporting on Democratic-administration shortcomings on care-economy and reproductive-rights policy (Biden-era Build Back Better failures, post-Dobbs Democratic-state implementation challenges), on intra-feminist disagreements on transgender-policy questions, and on labor-market gender data that doesn't always confirm progressive priors. The High factuality rating reflects careful sourcing, an editing bench drawn from The Texas Tribune and other rigorous newsrooms, transparent corrections, and a topic-specific deep-expertise advantage — beat reporters on care economy or reproductive health here often have deeper subject knowledge than generalist reporters at larger newsrooms.

Editorial vs news side

Pure news operation — The 19th does not run an opinion section, an editorial board or endorsements. The product is reported gender-and-policy journalism, period. The bias rating reflects only the news desk because there is no separate opinion product to weigh. What lean shows up shows up in the publication's mission-driven choice of which subjects to cover and which framings to use rather than in a separate opinion product. The mission itself is the editorial position.

Why we include them in nwsly

Gender, politics and policy newsroom; emphasis on women and LGBTQ+ coverage.

The 19th gives nwsly the gender-and-policy specialty slot — coverage of care economy, reproductive rights, women's electoral representation, transgender policy and family-leave legislation at a depth that no general-interest Lean Left outlet matches. These are coverage areas that have become politically central post-Dobbs and that legacy newsrooms cover at much shallower depth. It fills a specialty gap and surfaces stories that nwsly's general-news Lean Left sources pick up days later.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The 19th

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