The country's first newspaper devoted to abolition closed in 1820. Now, it's coming back.

The original Emancipator, the country’s first newspaper focused entirely on abolition, published its first and last issues in 1820 in Tennessee. Just over 200 years later, The Emancipator will return next month in Boston, part of a joint project from The Boston Globe and Boston University.

The Emancipator’s co-Editors in Chief, Deborah Douglas and Amber Payne, joined Boston Public Radio to talk about their vision for the publication.

The two leaders explained that the new iteration of The Emancipator will operate as a digital magazine with scholarly driven commentary, journalistic reporting, community events and social-first content.

“We are reimagining the first abolitionist newspapers for a new day, so reframing the conversation to really dissect, decode the underpinnings of white supremacy and how it impacts us all, no matter your race, ethnicity or background,” Payne said.

They view the publication’s leadership structure, with co-Editors in Chief, as the first step in reimagining journalism in the spirit of the abolitionist movement. “It really does speak to the history of these abolitionist publications, that it was a collective consciousness to get things done,” Payne said. “Why can't you rebuild a newsroom from the ground up in a new way?”

Payne emphasized that while The Emancipator’s goal is to tell the stories of marginalized communities, it is not explicitly a Black publication. “We're using the lens of Black liberation, the struggle, to tell stories about the way other communities are impacted by racism too, including white communities,” she said.

The co-Editors in Chief view their audience as twofold: people already engaged with and educated on issues of racial injustice, and those with an open mind looking to learn.

“We don't really have time for the people who don't want to know,” Douglas said. “But I would say based on the last Presidential election, there's a huge swath of the country that really wants to know, really wants to do better, be better and show up and make better decisions and we want to help them do that.”

Douglas and Payne plan to tackle this mission through a solutions journalism based approach, which looks to provide answers to community problems rather than solely pointing out the issues. Douglas said this starts with how they view subjects in a story.

“You are looking at these people, not from defining them by that one bad thing that's happened to them, that one story, that one data point that gets replicated over and over again,” she said. “You're looking at them in the fullness of their humanity, who they purpose themselves to be when they get up every day.”

The Emancipator’s official relaunch will come next month, starting with a series about racial wealth gap by The Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a comic strip by cartoonist Joel Christian Gill titled “Everything’s Racist: The Difficult History Behind Everything” and more.

In the 1800s, many considered the original Emancipator — which had many Boston subscribers — too radical because it called for the immediate end of slavery. Payne and Douglas said that with their work they hope to continue the publication’s work to envision a world that does not yet exist.

“The Emancipator and the principles of the journalism we’re putting forward is calling for the end of racism,” Payne said.

Deborah Douglas and Amber Payne are co-Editors in Chief of The Emancipator, a partnership with The Boston Globe opinions team and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.