Here’s the State of African-American Media Today — and Steps It Can Take Going Forward

 

By Christine Schmidt

“It’s important that we stop thinking of ethnic media as a ‘nice to have,’ as something on the side. It’s a must have,” Glenn Burkins of Q City Metro, a Charlotte-based African-American news website, said at the Knight Media Forum earlier this week. Discussions about how to better amplify and support diverse media are still a core part of the future of the industry — and the numbers are unfortunately still dismal — but it helps to have a data-driven understanding of the state of ethnic media now.

Appropriately, Democracy Fund released a report on the state of African-American media in the last days of Black History Month here in the U.S. It includes a detailed history of African-American media, from the 1800s’ Freedom’s Journal and Frederick Douglass’ The North Star — creating a legacy of, according to the late Columbia Journalism professor Phyllis Garland, “never [intending] to be objective because it didn’t see the white press being objective. It often took a position. It had an attitude. This was a press of advocacy. There was news, but the news had an admitted and a deliberate slant.”

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Source: NiemanLab