Black people account for over 40% of missing person’s cases in the US, and White women account for less than one third. Despite this, White women account for over half of missing person’s news coverage. This inequality in reporting not only exposes enduring biases in journalism, but also directly harms the missing persons’ chances of being found. In the months before our campaign launched, the case of missing woman Gabby Petito reinvigorated a nationwide conversation around racial biases in missing persons reporting, a failing often termed “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. Our campaign tapped into this conversation by quantifying the imbalance itself. Over the last 60 years, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has established itself as one of the world’s most respected voices on press criticism, and Are You Pressworthy? aimed to strike a nerve by bringing measured, personal context to the inequality in missing persons reporting.

Press coverage of missing people is biased against people of color, with young White women covered extensively, a failing often termed “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. To fight this imbalance, and push for coverage equality, we created AreYouPressworthy.com, an online tool where users enter their demographic information, and see how much press coverage their story would attract, and from which publications, should they go missing. Results were based on a representative sample of 3,630 news stories about missing persons collected by Meltwater between January to November, 2021, cross-referenced with the national missing persons database (NAMUS). Users were encouraged to tweet their results at journalists and news outlets, starting a conversation about the inequality and bias found in pressrooms across the US.

Are You Pressworthy? was built around a unique online data tool that allowed people to calculate their press value if they were to go missing, based on current reporting in America. The model was based on a representative sample of 3,630 news stories about missing persons collected by Meltwater between January to November, 2021 cross-referenced with the national missing persons database (NAMUS). The tool analyzed users’ “press value,” calculated by comparing a users’ demographic information (age, race, gender, location), to the amount of times those specific demographics appeared in the sampled news stories. These outputs were then contextualized with patterns found in the data to give users reference points to understand results; for example, how many Americans would hear their story and how this compares to other demographic groups.

At AreYouPressworthy.com, users entered their age, their location, their ethnicity, and their gender. From there, the online tool calculated the user’s inputs against a representative database of 3,630 news stories, and displayed their results. Individual results listed the amount of articles the user would appear in if they went missing, a breakdown between local and national news, plus which news outlets would be likely and unlikely to report on them. Users also saw where they landed on the spectrum of coverage, and how much coverage they might receive if their demographic information was different. Finally, users were confronted with real missing persons cases that received zero press coverage, and were encouraged to tweet their results at media outlets to push for change.

Our design efforts focused on clarity and scale in terms of representation of the problem, and the user’s relative standing, comparative to users from different ages, races, and other backgrounds. The intention behind the website design was to create something that flowed simply between pages, and took the user seamlessly through the information entry process, while delivering their results in a visually engaging way that highlighted where they sat in comparison to other demographics.

AreYouPressworthy.com received more than 1.12 Billion PR impressions, was covered by over 850 global news outlets, including NBC News, Forbes, USA Today and ABC News. Over 220,000 people have calculated their personalized press value, with over 7,000 sharing their results on their social channels in the first week alone. Hundreds of journalists engaged with the campaign on twitter, and some news outlets have begun to reassess their reporting standards around missing people of color.