| The Long Wave emerged from the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, a 10-year restorative justice initiative launched last March, and evolved through months of research and development. “The Guardian has been considering for some time an editorial format that would truly serve Black audiences worldwide,” says Nesrine. This focus aligns with the Guardian’s broader commitment to global coverage of the Black experience: earlier this year, the paper appointed Natricia Duncan as its first Caribbean correspondent, brought on Eromo Egbejule and Carlos Mureithi to cover Africa and stationed Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro to report on South America. “We recognised an underserved group of readers who weren’t finding the culture, news, and analysis they wanted in mainstream media,” Nesrine says. What does the diaspora mean to you? Nesrine, who was born and raised in Sudan and has lived in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hadn’t reflected deeply on what the Black diaspora meant to her personally until she began focusing on the newsletter. “I realised that the diaspora had become a second home for me, a place I could reach out to – whether on social media or in real life – that made me feel grounded,” she says. “When I travelled, I didn’t notice until later that I was always seeking out ‘the Black stuff’ – Black food, Black music, Black culture.” This search for familiar cultural markers was fuelled by the nostalgia and homesickness Nesrine experienced after moving to Europe in her mid-20s. “I don’t have a large family in the UK and I didn’t migrate with anyone, so I’ve often felt a bit on my own. The diaspora has made me feel far less alienated, less estranged – it made me feel like wherever I was in the world, I was kind of OK,” she says. Why a newsletter? Once this gap was identified, Nesrine and Jason explored numerous ideas for how they could fill it. Newsletters offer freedom – unlike other mediums, they could experiment more with form and length. “It seemed like the most exciting, expansive format for us. We can feature profiles, interviews, book reviews or in-depth analysis,” Nesrine says. The various sections also make it easy to spotlight events, recipes, films and discourse from around the world, tying them together in a cohesive way. The Long Wave will have a distinctive tone and focus compared with Nesrine’s other work, including her column, she says. Newsletters create a more “intimate” space, fostering a “dynamic conversation” between writer and reader, which moves away from the top-down, distant style of reporting and column writing. A new offering The Long Wave is breaking away from conventional narratives about Black communities and countries: “The media tends to focus on either crisis or boosterism,” Nesrine says. In many newsrooms, space for Black stories has traditionally been limited to extremes – stories of conflict, famine or hardship dominate, balanced with hyper-positive portrayals of resilience to compensate for the glut of suffering. However, this strategy risks flattening the complexity of Black experiences worldwide. Nesrine concedes that “you can’t capture the experience of such a vast, diverse and sometimes deeply incongruent diaspora. But all of humanity is full of these contrasts, and we share common threads.” The Long Wave seeks to pull at these threads with a fresh, authentic voice and thoughtful curation of stories that reflect an expansive, nuanced view of what it means to be Black across the world. The Long Wave is here to bring readers perspectives they won’t find elsewhere. Sign up here to get the newsletter every Wednesday – and here’s the very first from this week, which expands on Nesrine’s personal story behind The Long Wave. | 