(Illustration by iStock/Alyona Jitnaya)
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Elinor Tatum, editor in chief of The New York Amsterdam News, New York City’s oldest Black newspaper, decided a new approach to journalism was needed to report on the pervasive violence and discrimination experienced by the Black community. A third-generation journalist, Tatum wanted to support local Black journalism to be able to investigate racial injustice more deeply than the mainstream news media.
While newsrooms are in a steep decline, recent data from Pew Research shows growing news consumption of online sources, including social media, from which more than two-thirds of adults get their news.
Black journalism, however, is being left behind in this digital transition. Black Americans are more likely than any other racial group to receive their news from traditional news sources, such as local television stations and local newspapers.
Tatum contacted other Black-owned media organizations to find a way to ensure that Black journalism could survive and thrive in a new era. In 2020, 10 prominent Black publications—The New York Amsterdam News, The Atlanta Voice, The Houston Defender, The Washington Informer, The Dallas Weekly, The St. Louis American, The Michigan Chronicle, The Afro, The Seattle Medium, and The Sacramento Observer—formed a collaborative to launch the Fund for Black Journalism, a program that financially supports Black-owned and -operated news media.
The fund is administered in partnership with Local Media Foundation (LMF), the charitable trust of the nonprofit Local Media Association that helps media companies sustain financial stability in the rapidly changing media landscape. The fund enabled the collaborative’s creation of Word In Black, the first-ever nationwide newsroom based on local reporting by, for, and about the Black community. The eponymous online platform is managed editorially by the 10 publishers of the collaborative.
“There are over 230 Black-owned newspapers still in this country,” says journalist Nick Charles, former managing director of Word In Black, “and what most of them need is a smooth and efficient transition to digital products.”
Localization is the method of this transition. This occurs by financially supporting local journalism and then publishing it on the Word In Black platform. Editorially, the collaborative determines issues that are timely to the Black community. The fund allocates money to local Black publishers to add such reporting to their local editions. In addition, Word In Black editors collate stories around specific topics and then craft a separate story using a national framework to align the multiple local perspectives of the member publications.
Supported by philanthropic and individual donations, the fund has the goal of raising $25 million by 2023. By early 2022, seven months into the fundraiser that launched late last summer, it had raised $750,000, including donations from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation. A $300,000 endowment from Google covered the platform’s operational costs.
The tech giant has committed to increasing the industry’s racial diversity. “It’s important that Google continues to support media telling the stories of underrepresented audiences,” says Chrissy Towle, head of Google’s news partnerships.
The fund has also recently hired longtime journalist Liz Dwyer to oversee the platform—one of six full-time staff the fund hopes to hire by 2023. Dwyer has three goals for the platform. The first is “building our infrastructure so that we’re uber-efficient, even more supportive of the work of our publishers, and better able to engage with the Word In Black community,” she explains. The second is hiring staff, and the third, she adds, is “ensuring the content we create continues the tradition of excellence and community responsibility that the Black press has had since day one.”
Reaching youth through social media will be important for the platform’s future. Dwyer sees opportunity in keeping up with the digital-native generations of Black youth as well as older generations who primarily rely on traditional media.
“Sometimes people think [embracing social media] means ditching older generations, but I approach this as a ‘yes, and’ situation, because Black youth aren’t disconnected from their elders or ancestors,” she says. “The Black press has an advantage because our households are often intergenerational. At dinnertime, everyone shares what’s happening in the community and connects with each other.”
By embracing an intergenerational and community-based approach to Black journalism, the fund hopes to connect Black communities and sustain the legacy of Black journalism.
Read more stories by Likam Kyanzaire.