Twentieth-Century Ideology Meets Twenty-First-Century Technology: Black News Websites and Racial Uplift

Abstract

While traditional Black-owned newspapers have been slow to embrace the Internet, Whiteowned media and African American entrepreneurs are taking advantage of openings in this technological space. About 35 percent of African Americans get their news from the Internet and that figure is expected to grow. Black newspapers have formed the foundation of much historical research on African American life, yet scholars have given almost no attention to the growth of Black news websites. This paper looks at three onlineonly news sites geared toward African Americans and how their editorial content compares to traditional Black-owned print publications. TheGrio.com, theRoot.com and theloop21.com launched in 2008 and 2009 with the goal of attracting a middle-class African American audience, even though White-controlled media companies own two of the three. The history of the Black press has been one of advocacy and aspiration. The first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, sought to plead our own cause because too often Whites had spoken for Blacks and what they said was almost always negative. In this new digital world, Black news websites continue that tradition and more. One publisher said that the Black press used to allow only a few to speak for the many in the Black community, but digital journalism allows more African Americans to speak for themselves. The role that photography plays on these sites is critical to forming a positive racial self-identity. Besides this positive framing, the websites aim to show the heterogeneity among Blacks in the U.S. and in the Diaspora. The three sites appear to have merged old-school ideology with new-school technology.