The most revealing thing about Veritas Group is not on its website. The website, at present, says “Coming Soon,” which is either a modest digital intermission or an unusually committed piece of conceptual art. The useful evidence lives elsewhere: in a journalism conference that suddenly had to become an online production; in a California bill that almost failed by succeeding badly; in a news outlet designed around the economics of freelance work; and in years of press releases where BA Snyder’s name appears beneath someone else’s logo.
Put those fragments together and a particular kind of agency comes into focus. Veritas is a founder-led communications and production firm, established in 2011, that works with nonprofits, journalism organizations, advocacy coalitions and mission-driven media. It offers the familiar things - strategy, messaging, brand work, media relations and reputation management - but its interesting habit is to keep going. Promotion becomes production. A client relationship becomes a new publication. A policy message becomes a coalition with a legislative plan.
This is a useful distinction. Conventional public relations begins with a thing and asks how to attract attention to it. Veritas’s public record suggests an earlier question: what must the thing become before attention will help?
A press agency for people who worry about the press
Veritas has found a defensible patch of ground inside the media economy. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists used the firm as its communications representative across advocacy, conventions, awards and crisis response. Farmworker Justice put Snyder on a media contact line for a pesticide-safety report. The Latino Newsletter named Snyder and Veritas its official marketing and communications team in 2025. Meanwhile, Snyder spent two and a half years as an Entrepreneur in Residence in the Knight Foundation’s Journalism Program, focused on the market value of local-news infrastructure and consumer demand.
These customers do not merely want coverage. They are often the people producing coverage, protecting reporters, finding money for reporting or persuading an audience that trustworthy local information is worth paying for. The communications assignment therefore folds back on itself. Veritas is helping the press explain why the press matters.
“People tend to overlook the need for communications and information during a disaster, but it’s a basic need as well.”BA Snyder, on post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico
After Hurricane María, that principle became literal. Comparative data showed Puerto Rico receiving less coverage than Hurricanes Harvey and Irma had generated on the mainland. NAHJ launched an emergency initiative to help journalists report from the island and give communities access to communications tools. The effort raised nearly $30,000 for equipment. Snyder served as project editor and pushed the longer idea: newsrooms should develop response guides before the next disaster arrives.
The bill that first went backward
The cleanest view of the Veritas method comes from California Senate Bill 98. Journalists covering protests had been injured, detained and arrested. The proposed bill would extend the access protections reporters already had in disaster zones to protests and civil disturbances. Then came the failure: an amendment would have required journalists to seek an incident commander’s approval to remain after an unlawful assembly was declared. A bill meant to protect independent reporting would instead have made access conditional on police permission.
The coalition - more than 20 journalism groups, unions, lawyers and press-freedom advocates - did not respond with one grand piece of messaging. It built pressure in layers. Members called legislators repeatedly and requested meetings. They explained the practical effect of the language. Senators began opposing the amendment publicly, and the troublesome provision was removed. Then the campaign entered another negotiation over language. When the bill reached the governor, who had vetoed a similar measure the year before, the coalition changed scale again.
The persuasion stack
One audience at a time, then all of them at once
Supportive op-eds appeared in major California newspapers. Editorial boards endorsed the bill. Two videos showed what encounters between police and reporters looked like in practice, then social threads surrounded those images with evidence and argument. The videos drew more than 50,000 views. On October 9, 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 98.
The public price tag was never disclosed. The visible cost was coordination: staff and volunteer time across more than 20 groups, repeated legislative contact, negotiated language, editorial work and video production.
What changed minds was not “awareness” in the abstract. Each stage removed a different excuse. Meetings made the defect hard to misunderstand. Negotiated language offered a workable alternative. Editorial support demonstrated breadth. Video supplied proof that the danger was not hypothetical. The campaign worked because the coalition understood that one message, however polished, cannot do four political jobs.
When the format changes, the job changes
In 2020, the International Symposium on Online Journalism faced a different kind of failure: the physical conference model became impossible. ISOJ did not need a publicity flourish for a canceled gathering. It needed a new gathering. For the first time, organizers brought in a professional PR and marketing team. Veritas handled parts of production and distribution, working alongside the Knight Center, university technicians and interpreters. The online event reached thousands of people around the world.
That assignment is a compact explanation of the business. Veritas sells judgment at the seam between message and delivery. Its apparent model is the standard private-agency mix of projects and retainers, but the services sit unusually close together.
For a client, the advantage is continuity. The people defining the audience can remain present when the event is produced, the fundraising appeal is written or the coalition decides how to escalate. That reduces the expensive handoff in which strategy is translated from one vendor to another until its edges disappear.
The publication hiding inside the contract
The most ambitious example may be palabra, the nonprofit outlet developed during Veritas’s tenure with NAHJ and co-founded by Snyder. Its design began with an unglamorous observation: freelance journalists operate in a volatile field and need more than an assignment. The outlet set out to provide back-office infrastructure, create talent pipelines and connect local reporting to national and global context.
Here the agency did not simply improve a brand. It helped turn an institutional promise - fair and accurate Latino representation - into a product with workflows, contributors and publishing logic. That move places Veritas somewhere between a PR firm, a fractional communications office and a venture studio for civic media.
There are limits. This embedded model asks for trust, access and patience. It is poorly suited to a buyer who wants only a burst of mentions, refuses to expose internal constraints or measures progress by activity counts alone. Coalition campaigns also fail when members cannot agree on the exact change they want, when no credible evidence makes the harm visible or when the decision-maker is insulated from public and constituent pressure.
But under the right conditions, Veritas offers a practical playbook. Define the outcome precisely. Map who can block it and who can validate it. Run private persuasion beside public evidence. Build distribution into the product rather than bolting it on at launch. And when the first plan meets reality, change the format before changing the goal.
The agency market is crowded with firms promising to “tell your story.” Veritas Group’s more interesting work starts one step earlier. It helps construct an organization, campaign or event that has a story worth telling - and then stays around long enough to make sure the machinery works.