The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

George Curry’s not totally wrong here by citing the obvious: ad agencies discriminate against Af-Am owned media. You’d think after the Katz fiasco from a couple of years back, there would be more effort by the ad industry to diversify their buys given the the slightly higher rates of media consumption by Af-Ams.

OTOH, there are two mitigating circumstances. One is there are now Af-Am owned ad agencies (Don Coleman, Spike DDB, etc.). Two, American newspaper readership is in decline throughout the country. Curiously, magazines are bucking the downward arcs of circulation and revenue sales experienced by newspapers. It’s evident the problems facing Af-Am owned newspapers and newspapers in general aren’t endemic to the entirety of print media.

While Black-owned newspapers are in desperate need of business models in step with today’s market realities, IMO the keys to their future success are in content and sales strategy rather than technology. An argument can be made the Black press isn’t losing ad dollars or viewers to the Internet — especially given Internet news outlets are ‘loss leaders’ subsidized by owners of print and other media corporations (e.g.; Black Planet). Also, most Black-owned newspapers already have web sites. Presuming the need for Black print media as bona fide, I’m not sure a merger between two or more papers (or with other media companies) would address the core challenges facing the industry.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, while many of these Black-own papers do have an online presence (as you pointed out), many of them only post information once a week (weeklies). Most people want their information yesterday and are not willing to wait a week to get it. That is one of the main reasons why newspapers are loosing readership to alternative sources such as blogs and other online news formats.

As you also pointed out, the industry in general is seeing a decline in readership (not just Black newspapers). However how many times do you see mainstream papers like the LA or NY Times blasting potential advertisers because they choose not to advertise in their paper? If Black newspapers have as much “juice” in the community that Curry is claiming here, wouldn’t that be a BIGGER problem for the advertisers? Yes, strategy is something they should look at. This should also include a real-world look at Black newspapers that are barely turning a profit.

I agree one problem with Black-owned newspapers is their publication cycles. But I know of independent weeklies that make a tidy profit. I suspect many Black-owned papers attempt to be all things to all people on a shoestring budget when they’d be better off focusing their limited resources covering one or two local issues in depth. This is what I was alluding to earlier when discussing content. Perhaps NNPA could then syndicate these articles to affiliated newspapers.

I’m not convinced newspapers are ‘losing’ readers to blogs and the Internet per se as much as they have yet to understand how to adapt web technology to their advantage. For example, the blogosphere’s accommodation of disinformation and misinformation makes for a very risky proposition to ‘credible’ media outlets attempting to compete by sheer volume or speed of information delivered. Yet, a Washington Defender has the capacity to produce an in-depth profile, series or study far beyond that of an individual blogger with much more reliability. I see publishers of Af-Am newspapers redefining their roles (publishers become infomerchants) and their ways of doing business (‘open’ submission policy, content diversification, licensing, etc.) in order to survive into the future.

Your questions raise an interesting point about the compromises inherent with commercial news.