About us

Farai Chideya has spent more than three decades listening to Americans that polls miss. An award-winning multimedia journalist, author, and radio host, she built her career on a simple conviction: the real signal is in how people talk, not which box they check. In 2016, reporting FiveThirtyEight's The Voters series, her qualitative field reporting predicted the presidential election outcome before the quantitative data did.

Farai has worked at nearly every level of American media. She hosted NPR's News and Notes, reported for ABC News and Newsweek, served as a political analyst for CNN, and covered consumer data and privacy for The Intercept. She was a senior writer at the data journalism organization FiveThirtyEight, where she fused statistical rigor with on-the-ground reporting. She is also the creator and host of Our Body Politic, launched in 2020, an independent radio show and podcast centering how Black women and other women of color shape news and politics.

She was early to see technology reshaping how people tell their stories. In 1995 she founded PopandPolitics.com, one of the earliest pop culture blogs in the United States, which over fifteen years became a training ground for young arts and culture journalists. She later served on the Knight Foundation's Journalism Advisory Committee and as a program officer on the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression team, shaping investment in the future of journalism itself.

Farai is the author of six books spanning nonfiction and fiction, including Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans, The Color of Our Future, and Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters, along with The Episodic Career, Innovating Women (co-written with Vivek Wadhwa), and a novel. Her work has been taught on college campuses across the country.

She has taught as a professional in residence at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, a visiting professor at USC's Annenberg School of Communication, and distinguished writer in residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, which in 2000 recognized her as a most honored alumna.

Her honors include a National Education Reporting Award, the North Star News Prize, an Enterprise Reporting Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association.

With ARP, Farai is building the infrastructure she spent her career wishing existed: a way to capture the sentiment and texture of what people are thinking — verified, consent-driven, and at scale.