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    Which missing people become national news?

    Moving beyond status
    Nov 18, 2022 5 minutes
    Source: Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

    National news outlets in the United States have a long history of devoting a disproportionate amount of resources to stories about young missing white women, while ignoring other missing persons cases as not newsworthy, and thus dismissing them.

    Recently, the Columbia Journalism Review released a tool where users input their age, gender, location, race and ethnicity to estimate how many media stories they would garner should they go missing. (The tool predicts that young, white women will get exponentially more coverage than others.)

    Given how many people go missing every year (over 600,000 to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) and how few stories actually make national news, it's reasonable to question the criteria national newsrooms use for covering a missing person as a national story. The truth is, it's very subjective and heavily dependent on local media, which

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