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Matter Independent news nonprofit serving those seeking new and challenging perspectives on issues that matter.

Matter News is your independent news featuring challenging perspectives on issues that matter: community, culture, and overlooked voices of Columbus. We serve civically-minded Columbus residents who are underserved by the current media landscape. Our Mission:
- To empower people to be informed community members through innovative, investigative journalism covering the most pressing issues affectin

g central Ohio. Our Vision:
- To inspire equitable and sustainable community engagement in the greater central Ohio region.

“I think in today’s political sphere, there’s a lack of willingness to take more risk and to experiment with political a...
05/11/2026

“I think in today’s political sphere, there’s a lack of willingness to take more risk and to experiment with political action,” said Cye, who lamented how protests have become increasingly “sanitized” to create as little disruption as possible, recalling that many of the 2024 DNC demonstrations took place in so-called “free speech zones” located at considerable remove from convention events. “And as things went on, eventually even that ‘free speech zone’ was cleared by riot cops. And I think that’s an incredible mirror for what is currently happening in politics, especially for trans people. They’re saying, ‘Okay, we’re removing your ability to do this. But don’t worry, because we’re still giving you these spaces for you to have political action or to express yourself.’ … And then even those spaces the state says they’re going to give us, they end up pushing us out and pushing us even more to the margins.”

Drag performers, trans activists, and their allies will join forces in protesting the anti-drag bill HB 249 outside of the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday, May 12.

As a poet, Amoah has always been concerned first with how her verses resonate when read aloud – “I need to be convinced ...
05/08/2026

As a poet, Amoah has always been concerned first with how her verses resonate when read aloud – “I need to be convinced of the beauty of the sound of a poem before I can actually write it down,” she said in an August 2024 interview – and in touring Robinson’s home, she has given some consideration to the sonics offered by each room.

“And I haven’t read anything aloud here yet, but the orating or reading aloud of something is very much part of my process,” said the poet, who allowed that the house's different pockets could elicit different feels and tones in the writing as it takes shape over these next two months. “And that’s why I’m spending so much time in each room now, because I want to see what the energy of each room feels like. Then when I’m writing, if I need a particular energy or motivation, I might have a better sense of which space can give me that.”

The Columbus poet has big plans for the next couple of months that she’s slated to work in Robinson’s former home on the East Side, but she’s going to start by taking things room by room.

In the years since Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Meade shot and killed her son, Casey Goodson Jr., Tamala Payne...
05/07/2026

In the years since Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Meade shot and killed her son, Casey Goodson Jr., Tamala Payne has continued to post photos to social media in which he’s never older than 23 – the age at which Meade approached Goodson outside of his grandmother’s house on Dec. 4, 2020, shooting him six times from behind with a high-powered rifle, killing him.

On Thursday, a Franklin County jury found Meade guilty of reckless homicide in the death of Goodson.

A Franklin County jury found the former Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy guilty of reckless homicide for shooting and killing the 23-year-old Goodson in December 2020.

Cabey’s debut poetry collection, Get Funky, Get Swoll, out now, began to take form amid this tumult, its earliest entrie...
05/07/2026

Cabey’s debut poetry collection, Get Funky, Get Swoll, out now, began to take form amid this tumult, its earliest entries growing from the fractures in these relationships and exploring the various ways the writer said he had been “brainwashed to believe that white was pure and beautiful and holy and great.”

“And as I began to study and read about racism, and I began to talk to the enclaves I was friends with, I lost a lot of relationships, and so I felt stranded in the world,” said Cabey, who will celebrate the release of Get Funky, Get Swoll in conversation with Marcus Jackson at Prologue Bookshop on Friday, May 8. “And I had to begin to reorder my mind in order to survive that reality. … And the book took shape out of me wanting to navigate and reconcile these experiences so that I wouldn’t continue down the rabbit hole of self-hate.”

The Columbus poet will celebrate the release of his debut collection in conversation with Marcus Jackson at Prologue Bookshop on Friday, May 8.

Across the country, local governments have long fetishized sports franchises that allow them to say they lead a major le...
05/07/2026

Across the country, local governments have long fetishized sports franchises that allow them to say they lead a major league city! They want it so badly they’ll throw away $1.6 million dollars’ worth of revitalization planning for a badly needed park in an often-neglected area – as Columbus has done by allowing McCoy Park, on the Southwest Side, to become a training complex for the NWSL team.

It’s great that the world of professional sports is becoming less of a men-only place. But a city that wants to support women’s athletics should focus more on ensuring that parks in neglected neighborhoods have the facilities and programs for the girls and young women who live in the neighborhood.

What this gets down to is that economic development strategies in general are more focused on helping existing corporations get stronger than on actually developing something new.

That’s been the hallmark of the secretive JobsOhio, which for the past 15 years has taken credit for almost any job “created” in Ohio – even if its corporate handouts of taxpayer dollars too often went to companies that already planned to come here.

New from Brian Williams.

Economic strategies in Ohio are more focused on helping existing corporations get stronger than on actually developing something new.

In explaining the forces that led him to return to "Whiteland," Butler eventually homed in on a specific moment from the...
05/06/2026

In explaining the forces that led him to return to "Whiteland," Butler eventually homed in on a specific moment from the State of the Union address President Donald Trump gave to Congress in March 2025, during which he named Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a 13-year-old diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, an honorary Secret Service agent – a move the artist described as “performative,” and which he said reminded of him of how he felt in the wake of the Pride Parade he attended with his then-infant son in June 2017.

“And that was the same Pride Festival where the Black Pride 4 got assaulted, and I remember being in the crowd and holding my son up, and people cheering on my son because he was in the midst of everybody, and I was holding him up like ‘The Lion King,’” Butler said. “And someone took a picture, and it ended up in 614 magazine. And in that same issue where they had my son’s picture, it did not have anything in it about the Black Pride 4. … And everybody was sh****ng on these four Black people who were fighting for my son’s right to exist. And the juxtaposition of those two things, it’s the same feeling of rage I felt when I saw that father hold up his son at the State of the Union, because I saw my son in both of those moments. And I want to make sure nobody is used as a pawn for this scheme of wealth and whiteness. That’s what I want my role to be in all of this.”

The Columbus artist’s thought-provoking new exhibition kicks off at Hammond Harkins Galleries with an opening reception on Saturday, May 9.

Companion, the new album from the Durham, North Carolina band Sluice, vividly captures the mid-to-late 20s years when m...
05/06/2026

Companion, the new album from the Durham, North Carolina band Sluice, vividly captures the mid-to-late 20s years when many begin to find a sense of footing even as they remain clueless about what those next steps might be.

Singer and songwriter Justin Morris nods to this stake-planting on “Beadie” – “I used to move every spring,” he sings, and then adds, “Now I don’t” – and then spends the rest of the record trying to unpack both where he’s been and perhaps more importantly where he could go from here. On “Vegas,” he briefly flirts with abandoning music for a career in construction, while “WTF” is more blunt in its uncertainty. “I don’t know what the f**k is going on,” he sings. “Do you?”

To be completely transparent, not really. But there’s a sense of connection to be found in the knowledge that we’re all just fumbling our way forward as best we can, which is an idea that reaches full flower in the reflective “Unknowing.” Structured around a prayer published within Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude, from 1956, the track finds Morris, his voice digitized by a vocoder, seeking comfort in this ambiguity, steeled by an awareness that he’s accompanied on his journey by some kind of presence. “You are ever with me,” he intones, “and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Read up on Sluice ahead of the band's show at Rumba Cafe on Saturday.

The Durham, North Carolina band visits Rumba Cafe for a concert on Saturday, May 9, playing behind its excellent new album ‘Companion.’

Pigeon Pit frontwoman Lomes Oleander wrote the song “Anthill Mode” as a means to capture her mental state when she’s “fu...
05/05/2026

Pigeon Pit frontwoman Lomes Oleander wrote the song “Anthill Mode” as a means to capture her mental state when she’s “fully zoomed out,” as she explained it, taking in the social and political landscapes from 30,000 feet above the Earth.

“When you’re in an airplane looking down from above, you see all these identical neighborhoods, and it’s hard to see any humanity or to have any hope for the individual,” Oleander said by phone ahead of the Olympia, Washington folk-punk band’s concert at Dirty Dungarees on Wednesday, May 6. “It’s like the futility of being in traffic, where everyone is pi**ed off and hating each other all because they’re trying to get to their job a little faster. It’s f**king crazy and not okay. … And then you compare that to zooming in to the little s**t you have in your life, and the people you have, and the uniqueness you get to experience, which is so sick. And I think a lot of my strategy in songwriting is zooming in on those little moments that I see in my life and trying to remember them and hold onto them.”

This reality holds on Pigeon Pit’s most recent album, Leash Aggression, from 2025, where Oleander makes clear these surrounding big-picture faultlines (unchecked capitalism, the growing housing crisis, the psychological damage inflicted by being able to watch multiple genocides unfold in real time on social media) but continues to home in on those moments of intimacy that can serve as emotional ballast. “I’ll take the wins that I can get with my time/Like a morning spent in bed with a love of mine,” she sings on “Go Ahead Then! Beat Me to Death!”

The Olympia, Washington folk-punk band hits Dirty Dungarees for a concert on Wednesday, May 6.

Attending college at Indiana University, music journalist and author Erin Osmon said she would roll her eyes on those oc...
05/04/2026

Attending college at Indiana University, music journalist and author Erin Osmon said she would roll her eyes on those occasions when she would spy Bloomington resident and famed Indiana native son John Mellencamp driving around town in one of his fancy cars.

“I sort of grew up in the shadow of Mellencamp,” said Osmon, whose rebellious stance toward the musician has softened over the years, particularly as she worked on her latest book, Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America, released last week, which she’ll discuss in conversation with the Columbus poet Maggie Smith at Prologue Bookshop tonight (Monday, May 4). “There’s just a lot more to him than he allowed people to see in the ’80s. … When he started … he was bratty and overly sexual and trying to be the misfit, trying to be the loudmouth. And then he matured with [1985 album] Scarecrow, and he matured when he began writing from his own backyard in a mature, holistic way. … And so, I went from really resenting him being seen as Indiana’s mascot to being really proud of it. And when the [Indiana] Pacers were doing well last year and people were singing ‘Hurts So Good’ in the streets of Bloomington, I was like, ‘Yes. He’s my guy.’”

The Indiana-born, Nashville-based music journalist will discuss her new book in conversation with Columbus poet Maggie Smith at Prologue Bookshop tonight (Monday, May 4).

Here's a rundown of Tuesday's primaries from Local Politics columnist Jules Roscoe.
04/30/2026

Here's a rundown of Tuesday's primaries from Local Politics columnist Jules Roscoe.

Here are the local candidates on Franklin County’s ballot this year.

“And it’s not that we don’t want a professional women’s soccer team here, because we do. But we think it was rushed, and...
04/29/2026

“And it’s not that we don’t want a professional women’s soccer team here, because we do. But we think it was rushed, and we think it was done in a community that is consistently underserved, underrepresented, and typically not heard,” said Crayton, who plans to join others at Friday's rally in collecting signatures for a ballot initiative aimed at saving McCoy Park. “If nothing else, you’re going to hear us. You’re going to hear that we are angry. And we’re going to show up in the votes for mayor, for our District 7 representation, for our District 6 representation. So, if we can’t do something directly about McCoy Park, we’re absolutely going to do something when it comes time to change the powers that be at City Hall.”

In the wake of a City Council vote clearing the way for the bulk of McCoy Park to be handed over as the training facility for a new NWSL expansion team, local residents are staging a ‘Hands Off Our Park’ rally at the Southwest Side park beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, May 1.

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