Building the Next Generation

Inkstick is uniquely positioned to speak to and foster the next generation of foreign policy and national security thinkers. We’re building opportunities for young people to publish, create, and think beyond the confines of current leadership toward a brighter, more equitable, and more peaceful future. We represent the next generation of foreign policy, and we have the next generation’s ear. Our reputation among Millennial and Gen Z influencers in the global security space is unmatched, with nearly 70% of our audience falling between the ages of 18 and 44. This is true both inside and outside of government. Inkstick’s content is reaching the young people who staff government institutions and congressional offices, just as it is reaching young people in the pipeline toward those institutions and offices.

Redefining Security

Inkstick is conscious of being a gatekeeper to the historically segregated media industry and actively works to disrupt these trends. We play a key role in elevating underrepresented voices. For example, we have served as the first outlet for authors who have gone on, within the year, to publish in The New York Times. Inkstick is further leading the way in conversations that broaden our understanding of security, radically rethinking the interweave of foreign and domestic security. In doing so, Inkstick is changing the way we think about these issues: Shifting our global perspective to include the lived experience of impacted communities across the world. In the process, we are rewriting a history told by those traditionally in power, and beginning to move that power into the hands of “the rest of us.”

Forging a New Perspective

Over the past five years, Inkstick has built a community of domestic and global writers who take a nuanced lens to domestic and global security issues from their vantage points in places like Atlanta, New Mexico, Lagos, Malta, Beirut, Uttar Pradesh, and Lahore. Our authors tell stories that affect all of us from their distinct frames of reference, offering deep human perspectives on some of the most important questions of today. Hunter Williamson, for example, is a sharp young reporter who brings us on-the-ground stories from the Middle East and Europe including deep dives into Hezbollah’s private arsenal, and the religious undertones of the war in Ukraine. Ramona Wadi brings deep historic nuances and an artistic perspective to her coverage of Latin America.

Inkstick remains one of the few outlets focused on foreign policy and national security that does not accept money or influence from contractors or government entities that might color its views. Partly as a result, recent feedback has highlighted that Inkstick and its properties feature not just a diversity of voices but a diversity of opinions and perspectives that are not often found in other outlets.

Shining a Light on the Toughest Problems Others Miss

In 2022, Inkstick spearheaded a new beat by hiring Atlanta-based journalist Taylor Barnes as a field reporter for the military-industrial complex. In the months since she joined us, Barnes has kicked off a public records and legal battle with the state of Utah and Northrop Grumman to obtain access to a redacted contract to subsidize the defense contractor’s new intercontinental ballistic missile plant. She’s produced a first-of-its-kind dataset and report on dwindling union strength at the top five Pentagon contractors. She exposed the low rates of women’s employment at defense contractors — none of the top five have a workforce more than 25% female — and spoke with women at defense shops across the country about why. And outside of her written work, she led a watchdog workshop for activists across the country on investigating state and local subsidies to defense contractors. Taylor also corresponds with young journalists interested in the field as we cultivate a pipeline of future field reporters for the military-industrial complex we hope to employ in the years to come.

Our podcast, Things That Go Boom, highlights and elevates a diversity of voices and reaches a broad intersection of America through its appearance on National Public Radio. In its regular features on The World, the show reaches 500,000+ listeners on broadcast stations across the country, in addition to an average of 60,000 downloads/show. Things That Go Boom has also been featured by Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and NPR One, three of the largest platforms for podcast distribution. And as of the publication of this report, our first radio special, Food Fight, has been picked up in eight major markets including Seattle’s KUOW, where it aired on Memorial Day at noon.

This year on Things That Go Boom, Inkstick pioneered reporting on the connection between food insecurity in military families and Pentagon spending. This reporting was cited by Bill Hartung in an article for Forbes; Bill then served as a consultant for comedian Jon Stewart, who would explicitly cite the topic in a debate with Kathleen Hicks: “I can’t figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that’s f***ing corruption.”

In our weekly newsletter Critical State, produced in partnership with The World, Kelsey Atherton provides readers with the reporting, perspectives, context, history and voices they need to understand a world that too often feels defined by crisis. Atherton’s “Deep Dive” also takes readers beyond the headlines to examine a new piece of academic research in the kind of detail that rarely appears in the media. Academics and policymakers have highlighted in their interactions with Inkstick how invaluable this resource is to their research, as it shines a light on work they might otherwise miss.

Amplifying New Voices

Inkstick has nurtured and developed partnerships that increase the accessibility of policy analysis and elevate underserved voices. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a column in collaboration with Foreign for America’s NextGen network, a group of diverse young voices committed to principled American engagement in the world. Similarly, “Adults in a Room,” a series in cooperation with the Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program, gives readers a peek into back-room discussions about national security policy without unnecessary jargon and acronyms. In “The Mixed-Up Files of Inkstick Media,” writers Molly Hurley and Lovely Umayam link pop culture with national security. And in her new column, young author Raimy Khalife-Hamdan centers human rights, needs, and agency in enacting US foreign policy. We are also working with OrgsInSolidarity to turn their reports into commentary that increases visibility and access to issues such as advancing equity, tackling microaggressions in national security, and productively engaging with media on national security issues. And this year, Inkstick took on a co-chairing role in the “Elevating Black and POC Voices” working group, an effort to help bring marginalized voices in national security into the mainstream. 

The perspectives of those who have been historically silenced or spoken over are a mainstay in our publication. We’ve provided a platform for rethinking the arcane power structures of deterrence and nuclear policy, looked at how the legacy of African American migration, protection, and asylum should inform our international refugee policies, and provided a platform for young Afghan female activists grappling with the country’s path forward. We shared a Sami youth’s call for investment in climate resilient energy in the Arctic, explored how Native land became a target for nuclear waste, and how our history of nuclear weapons testing continues to have an impact on Indigenous food, made the link between domestic legislation on abortion rights and US imperialism and legacy of violence against Indigenous women, and shared never-released historic documentation from a Navy official implicated in horrific violence against the Chagossians by the construction of a US base at Diego Garcia.

Providing New Pathways To Enter the Global Security Field

With the Creative Capsule Residency we have expanded our unique interweave of creativity, political analysis and human empathy beyond the airwaves in a process-based 8-month residency for emerging creatives. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation and developed in partnership with Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts Collective, our inaugural residents took creative lenses to nuclear issues. Chantell Murphy is developing a film called Atomosphere that explores geography and nuclear mourning in New Mexico, asking tough questions about positionality, relationship to land and space, and the lingering impacts on lands and communities devastated by nuclear testing. Whit Montgomery is a painter who uses satire to explore the dystopic realities of normalized militarization. He is creating satirical posters from the “Department of Romaniticization” in Alpine Meadows, a fictional town set in a speculative future, living in the aftermath of nuclear war. Terrell Starr, host of the Black Diplomats Podcast and a survivor of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is exploring “nuclear blackmail” through the voices of Ukrainians on the ground.

We are committed to holding ourselves accountable in the process of, quite literally, changing the face of foreign policy. Inkstick’s annual audit is pushing the bar forward on diversity, equity, and inclusion in media. In 2022, 54% of Inkstick’s authors self-identified as women, and approximately 40% identified as people of color. 23% of our authors, further, identified as LGBTQ+, and 17% identified themselves as first-generation college students, while 32% identified as first or second-generation immigrants.

Inkstick’s reporters tell stories that affect all of us, offering deep and distinct human perspective on today’s most important questions. Inkstick’s ability to pay these authors fairly for their work, however, is limited, and so, then, is our ability to push the limits of that work, commissioning the kind of groundbreaking reporting that will take our publication, and these conversations, to the next level. In order to achieve our goals, our reporting must continue to grow.

Inkstick was established as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization on July 6, 2020. In the three years since, we have grown significantly, but remain small, punching far above our age and weight.

Investigative Reporting

The strength of small, niche outlets such as Inkstick is often underestimated. As leading public interest journalism outlet ProPublica has said, “More audience and greater reach does not necessarily enhance investigative journalism’s potential for impact. Large audiences, even if reached, may not be moved to act, or even to press others to do so. Targeting particular specialized audiences may prove more effective — and has, on a number of occasions, for ProPublica.” Inkstick aims to increase its capacity for investigative reporting significantly as it builds on its success in carving out a space for new voices and new perspectives in global security. 

A key area for this expansion is in our coverage of local security issues. For us global is local is global and we report on security issues with precision and depth whether the locus of the story is in the US, Kyiv, Beirut, or anywhere else in the world. This global perspective, in which we study our own domestic security threats, questions and movements with the same lens we take to the rest of the world, is radical in a field that continues to divide the world into “us and them,” “here and elsewhere,” “domestic and foreign.” We are building this unique perspective through the work of Taylor Barnes, our reporter on the military-industrial complex, who is looking at the interweave of American militarization and local economies throughout the US. We’ve taken this lens to deep dives into the links between the army and domestic policing, prison abolition and international policy, and unionization rates at America’s top defense contractors. And we want to launch a project looking at class and security tensions in the US, breaking new ground in a space long ignored.

Short-Form

Faced with a constant stream of content, short-form videos are quickly becoming the most popular avenue for attracting viewers and keeping them engaged. In fact, 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short form video to learn about a product or service, and this type of content is expected to continue to grow. These trends also apply to the consumption of information. Inkstick strives to meet its audience where they are. As we move to capture new audiences, we aim to expand our reporting to native short-form content. This will include bringing on a dedicated social media reporter, launching a TikTok, and expanding our newly-launched YouTube channel.