Can Media Reparations Help Save The Black Press?

Dozens of Black news publishers gathered last month for an annual convention where the 2024 presidential election and voter turnout were a top concern, but in other conversations, journalists raised issues about the state of the media landscape. “So, while there’s been some growth over the last few years, the last year has been a bit of a warning shot across the bow about where we are and our abilities to continue to grow audiences.” Media reparations may be the key to solving some of the problems facing the Black press, according to the media advocacy organization Free Press. Free Press During the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, Black Caucus at Free Press launched Media 2070, an initiative that began as an anthology of essays detailing the history of the media’s origins in racism and slavery — like running ads for enslaved persons, for example — and the importance of media reparations. The media reparations movement may seem like a pipe dream for Black publishers, who need resources now and aren’t necessarily thinking decades into the future. “Part of that process is investigating what it looks like to have infrastructure that can respond to harm better or what it looks like to create cultures of care in newsrooms, which is part of the work that could and would impact Black-owned press.” The Media 2070 team has already worked with the Black press in this endeavor, having collaborated with the New York Amsterdam News, one of the country’s oldest continuously run Black newspapers.