In 2000, as the dot-com bubble was experiencing its last burst, Black Enterprise assessed how African American-owned sites fared. Littered as the landscape was with dot-coms-turned-dot-bombs, the picture was hazy, at best. Fast-forward to 2009 and things look a bit different: Black-focused sites and blogs cover a huge swath of the Web 2.0 space and show no signs of decreasing. A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project report shows that African Americans and Hispanics far outnumber other groups engaging in online social networks (See “African Americans Love to Tweet,†Talking Points, August 2009).
Sites such as TheGrio.com, TheRoot.com, and Bossip.com, along with blogs such as Afro-Netizen and the social democracy site ColorOfChange (www.colorofchange.org), are leading the charge into a new digital era. So why the change? In a word: Obama. Well, not entirely, but his 2008 campaign’s use of social media technologies certainly highlighted the trend of African Americans taking to the Web en masse, causing mainstream to take notice.
“The Obama campaign and presidency really used the Internet to mobilize not just African Americans, but also Hispanics and the broader community,†says Donna Byrd, publisher at TheRoot.com, a Washington Post Co. site launched in January 2008 with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Everyone started going to the Internet to find more information on specific issues, and we just hadn’t seen that before.†Prior to joining The Root, Byrd worked as CEO of BlackAmericaWeb (www.blackamericaweb.com), helping Tom Joyner launch the site, and as a marketing and strategic consultant in Atlanta.
“There are many sites in the African American medi
a space that are doing well. Ours is focused primarily on news and current events. We’ve received tremendous feedback from our readers that this is something they’ve been looking for, for some time,†Byrd adds.But is the “Obama effect†really the cause? “We can’t really say that Obama has definitely converted black folks to the ways of the digerati,†says Chris Rabb, 39, the founder of Afro-Netizen (www.afro-netizen.com) and currently a visiting researcher at Princeton University. “There is a small but active group of black folks who are living digital in a fairly holistic way, but it’s not representative among the different demographics in our community.†And that, says Rabb, is a missed opportunity for the communities in which they engage.
Visual Basics
It’s a problem that David A. Wilson hopes he can address with TheGrio (www.thegrio.com), a video-based site that provides African American-focused news and information. Partnering with NBC Universal, Wilson, 32, a documentary filmmaker (Meeting David Wilson) who heads up Three Part Media L.L.C., is a former lead producer at CBS News, ABC News, and a FOX conglomerate. He launched the site in June 2009 because of what he saw, that most African Americans did not. “I found a lot of [stories] and content that would be of interest to African Americans but that never surfaced nationally. It would just live and die in the local context.†Wilson says he wanted to find stories that resonated with African American communities, build original content on the site, and develop opinion pieces around them. And as a filmmaker he is adamant that video is the way to go.
Considering the ways in which video has served as a launching point for political discourse, social protest, and change, Wilson says, “I do think that in a world where there
are so many cameras, video allows the story to live in a different form.†The site also serves another significant function: It provides African American writers access to mainstream audiences. Wilson explains that the partnership with NBC Universal places African American writers and site contributors–and their stories–in a national and international context.“The African American market hasn’t really been explored with news as much as it has been with entertainment, sports, and music. News is sort of a new concept in this space,†he says. “We try to put out information that’s smart, comes from a variety of perspectives, and is not condescending to our users.â€
Ownership is Key
Responding to some criticism of his venture, Wilson is explicit that “this is a black-owned entity.†Part of Rabb’s longstanding criticism of sites targeting African Americans has been the issue of ownership. “I think ultimately in the 21st century that there is a tacit disapproval of entities that are white-owned. Not that they can’t do the subject justice, but the starting point has to be equity. There has to be a meaningful [black ownership] stake.†Rabb notes that
He adds that the increase in the number of black celebrity entertainment and gossip blogs and sites is one indication of the failure of mainstream media to tell relevant black stories. Whether we love or loathe such sites, this surge in interest could bode well for other black-owned businesses, Rabb suggests. “The audiences of key bloggers are growing, and those relationships can yield all kinds of victories locally, nationally, and internationally, and these are the kinds of institutions we should invest in more methodically.â€
At press time, both The Root and TheGrio boasted a strong arsenal of contributors that includes journalists, academics, and artists. Within its first two months of operation, TheGrio saw a more than sevenfold increase in unique visitors, from 50,000 to 360,000, and it expects to exceed these numbers in coming months.
–Additional Reporting by David Hudson
This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.