Reckon is an award-winning national news organization that covers the people powering change, the challenges shaping our time, and what it means for all of us.

At Reckon, we believe we can best report on our nation—not by observing it from the sidelines—but by living in it day by day. Born out of the South and grounded in communities who have been marginalized, underestimated, and undervalued, we live our nation’s issues up close and intimately.

We aim to hold up a fuller and more accurate mirror of the lived experiences in this country so that we can all better understand the challenges we face and feel equipped to decide how we wish to move forward.

That’s why people are at the center of our stories on climate justice, reproductive rights, faith and purity culture, working mothers and families, queerness and trans rights, Blackness, racial justice, movements and more.

What Reckon does

 

We share stories by, for, from and about the full breadth of cultures, experiences and perspectives across the nation.

We put the tough questions on the table and invite our readers to think them through.

We push against simplistic, narrow narratives and embrace the nuance and intersectionality of people. We reject either/or propositions.

We help our readers develop a point of view on what they think so they feel equipped to take action.

We don’t break news the fastest and we don’t report for officials and those who don’t accept some fundamental truths.

Our company

Find our work on our website, social media and by subscribing to newsletters like Honey and Black Joy. Listen to our award-winning podcasts, including The Reckon Interview and Unjustifiable, or watch our short documentaries, including Mauled and Pulled Over/Pulled Under. Our journalists and their work have garnered major awards, including multiple Emmys, a national Edward R. Murrow Award and a Pulitzer Prize. 

Reckon is part of Advance Local and owned by Advance, owners of Conde’ Nast; and shareholders in Reddit, Warner Bros. Discovery and Charter Communications.

Our team

Danielle Buckingham is Reckon’s Black Joy Reporter, and a Chicago-born, Mississippi-raised writer based in Durham, North Carolina. A 2021 Lambda Literary fellow, her work has been published in MadameNoire, Midnight & Indigo Literary Magazine, Raising Mothers, and elsewhere. When Danielle isn’t writing or tending to her plants, you can find her talking Black spirituality, growing up in Mississippi, and pop culture on the Hoodoo Plant Mamas podcast.

Abbey Crain  is the creative strategist at Reckon and the creator and editor of the Honey newsletter. Crain has covered reproductive justice and gender issues across the South for the last five years. Before Reckon, she worked at the Wall Street Journal. Crain is also an artist with an expansive understanding of the human form and the way women and queer bodies are legislated and ruled against. 

Ariyon Dailey is a social producer for Reckon and contributor to Black Joy. She enjoys creating interactive experiences for everyone, especially younger generations and marginalized communities. She is an award-winning journalist with experience at The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News and more, honing her skills in audience, on-air and print work. She enjoys education, pop culture, food and creating social reporting via her TikTok called The Dailey Tap-In.

Denny, Reckon’s LGBTQ+ communities reporter, is a writer, actor, and musician who has co-starred in POSE (FX), New Amsterdam (NBC) and City On Fire (Apple TV). Aside from The Grammy, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Allure Magazine and more, her writing—“He Made Affection Feel”—was published in The New York Times’ Modern Love column. As of 2024, she is working on new music, a short film and a speculative nonfiction book.

Jonece Starr Dunigan  (she/her/hers) is a journalist who gives the microphone to communities that are often ignored by mainstream media. Guided by empathy, her reporting centers the stories, movement work and voices of Black, brown and queer people. Her writing strives to amplify and empower readers instead of exploiting them of their traumas. Starr is also the founder of Reckon’s Black Joy (formerly Black Magic Project), a media brand under Reckon that’s highlighting the multiple ways we as Black people cultivate liberating joy in our lives. She created the brand while she was a night reporter for Reckon’s sister news site AL.com in Birmingham, Ala. Starr lives with her life partner, Michael, in her hometown of Huntsville, Ala. Check out what the Black Joy team has to offer by following @blackjoyreckon on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. 

Sid Espinosa (she/her/ella) Reckon’s senior social media producer based in Washington D.C., is a creative social strategist specializing in video, photo, and the occasional meme. As the way we follow news continues to change, her experience as a Gen-Z visual journalist has empowered her to tell captivating stories and deliver impactful journalism with a social-first approach. Sid has received awards from The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation for her video work.

MacKenzie River Foy  is Reckon’s Black Joy’s social producer. She has experience taking media from concept to finish at Sirius XM, Arena Stage, the Public Theatre, Market Road Films, and as an independent writer, director, and producer. She was recognized by the NAACP and the Worker's Unite Film Festival for her short documentary, "Feed/back,” in 2022. 

Christopher Harress is Reckon’s east and Gulf Coast climate change reporter. Over the last six years, he has reported from towns and cities across the South, covering crime and criminal justice, while undertaking numerous investigations. He won an Overseas Press Club Foundation Award in 2013 for his investigation into the human trafficking of child soccer players from West Africa to Europe. In 2018, he was awarded two first-place Green Eyeshade awards for reporting on corruption inside a small-town police department in Alabama. Originally from Scotland, Harress now lives in Mobile, Ala.

Minda Honey serves as the editor of Black Joy by Reckon. She is also a writer, reader and the neighbor who never forgets to bring her trash bin in from the curb. She boomeranged home to Louisville, Ky. in 2016 after receiving an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. She led the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Spalding University, launched local alt-indie TAUNT with support from Press.On and the Google News Initiative Startup Bootcamp. Her memoir-in-essays, The Heartbreak Years, was released October 2023. You can also get a taste of her words in the anthologies A Measure of Belonging, Burn It Down, Sex & the Single Woman, and Black Told or read her essays and articles on Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, Longreads, Vice, Teen Vogue, The Oxford American, Catapult, Andscape and elsewhere.

Katie Johnston is Reckon's director of audience leading growth and engagement strategies for social, web and newsletters. She joined the team in June of 2022 from WhereByUs, a media startup org, where she founded and directed Pulptown, a hyperlocal newsletter and podcast in and about Orlando prior to leading its audience initiatives in Orlando, Miami (The New Tropic), Seattle (The Evergrey), Portland (Bridgeliner) and Pittsburgh (The Incline). When Katie's not geeking out over newsletter data and the day’s biggest social win, she's probably drinking wine, searching for the best local eats and walking her four-legged best friend, Cooper.

Ryan "R.L." Nave has been Reckon's editor since March 2020, when he joined to help oversee newsroom's relaunch into a brand for millennials in the South. Prior to joining Reckon, he helped launch and served as editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, now the state’s largest newsroom. There, he also ran the state's largest legislative team and oversaw coverage of criminal justice and environmental issues. Nave was also an editor and reporter at the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press and a staff writer for the (Springfield) Illinois Times, covering local and state government. His reporting has received dozens of state and national journalism awards and has led teams whose work garnered local, state and national journalism awards, including the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Journalism and an Edward R. Murrow Award. He was a 2019 McGraw Business Reporting fellow at City University New York and held fellowships at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. He served as president of the Jackson, Miss., chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists from 2015 to 2020 and is currently chairman of the board for the Jackson-based Center for Ideas, Equity & Transformative Change. He grew up near St. Louis in University City, Mo., and graduated from the University of Missouri. He lives in Birmingham.

Annabel Rocha is Reckon’s reproductive justice writer. She comes from a background of local reporting focused on Latinx issues, reproductive justice, period poverty and sexual health. She’s participated in fellowships with City Bureau, the USC-Annenberg's Center for Health Journalism, and the Journalism and Women’s Symposium, producing people-centered reporting projects on inequity. She is a proud Chicago native, from the South Side of the city.

April Siese, daily news editor, is a journalist with more than a decade of experience, having edited and written for Daily Kos, CBS News, Quartz and other outlets of note. She has a passion for environmental justice and equity work and previously served as senior staff writer with Daily Kos as well as the unit chair of the Daily Kos Guild.

Michelle Zenarosa  is Reckon’s deputy editor. She has almost 20 years of experience in journalism and media-making through a social justice lens, having worked at various news outlets like Fusion, Everyday Feminism, New America Media and LA Weekly. Previously, they were the community manager at USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, where they curated the MacArthur Foundation’s civic media fellowship. She has been a facilitator for storytelling by youth in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Palestine and was awarded the 2017 fellowship for the Society of Features Journalism and the 2023 Maynard 200 fellowship. She’s a tired mom, a grouchy ex-punk and is serious about her snacks.