What we cover
We report on the people, politics, culture, economy, and technology of Black America — and on HBCUs and Black athletes as first-class beats. Strong tips tend to be:
- A specific event, decision, filing, or record that hasn’t been reported.
- A pattern across places — several school districts, several police departments, several companies — that no one has connected.
- Something happening in a community that national outlets have missed.
- A first-hand experience with a document, dataset, or witness trail behind it.
If your tip is a general take or an opinion, that’s fine — we may still want to hear it, but consider whether it’s a letter to the editor rather than a news tip.
What to include
The more of these you can send, the faster we can move:
- What happened, in one or two sentences.
- When and where.
- Who is involved (or the roles, if you can’t name people yet).
- Any documents, filings, emails, photos, or recordings you can share.
- How you know what you know — witnessed it, work in the field, saw a filing, heard from someone directly involved.
- How we can reach you for follow-up. If you need to be anonymous, tell us.
Send it
Email tips@nationalreformer.com. If your tip is sensitive, say so in the first line of your message and we’ll move to a more secure channel.
If you need to be anonymous
We take source protection seriously. If you have a reason to worry about being identified — a job at stake, potential legal exposure, personal safety — tell us up front. We’ll work with you on how to communicate securely.
Some baseline guidance:
- Don’t use your work email or a work device.
- Don’t send us anything you took from a system you don’t have authorization to access — talk to us first about what’s okay to share and how.
- If you want end-to-end encrypted contact via Signal or a similar tool, email us and we’ll set it up.
Read our Ethics policy for how we handle confidential sources.
What happens next
A person on our staff reads every tip. We can’t always reply, and we can’t always pursue every lead — a small newsroom has to pick — but we do read them. If we decide to pursue your tip, someone will reach out.
We don’t share tips outside the newsroom, we don’t sell them, and we don’t hand them to advertisers or partners. If a court ever tries to compel us to identify a source, we’ll contest that request to the fullest extent of the law.
Not a tip, but something else?
Corrections: corrections@nationalreformer.com or see our Corrections Policy. Everything else: contact page.