—on BuzzFeed. I bet they now regret rejecting you (laughs).
It’s funny because people tell me, “Hey, we shared your tweet in our writing Slack channel. “This is how we found out the story and now we are going to write about it.” So you don’t have to have millions of followers, but I have a reach that’s a little different. And that’s important to me.
Should be.
That doesn’t mean I always do everything right. I always tell people that journalists make mistakes. We issue corrections. We do our best to do what we can. But the most important thing for me is to make sure that the stories that I think people need to know or read, I try to spread them, and apparently my Twitter page is the best way to do that.
There’s a reason people call you the Anderson Cooper of black Twitter.
There are too many nicknames. There was a Twitter thread with several different nicknames. It is humiliating. It’s nice to see that people care about what you’re doing. But it also reminds me how important it is, especially for our community, the Black community, to spread these stories and make sure that they are told and represented, and that people know about them.
And not just get them out, but get them out correctly.
Exactly.
This week the Pew Research Center published a study stating that many black Americans distrust American institutions because they believe they are conspiring against them. The same goes for the media. But many people online trust you as a source of news, which is increasingly rare these days.
And you know what, they’re not wrong (laughs). I’ve been reading about media repairs. In the 1960s, the Kansas City Star He totally ignored what was going on with the Civil Rights Movement and other things that were happening in the black community. So they trusted the black newsrooms, Kansas City Sunshine be one of them, to send them the news that interested them.
Obviously, when we talk about information deserts, black communities are completely exhausted. What is the quote? When white Americans get colds, black Americans get the flu. This is doubly true for black media and newsrooms. Every time I look at the layoff numbers, these gigantic losses that have occurred in traditional and local media, black newsrooms are disappearing at a faster rate than their white counterparts.
Sometimes I feel like the state of the industry is like trying to solve a riddle that can’t be solved, or doesn’t want to be solved, because, let’s face it, that’s a different discussion in itself. How can Black people better trust the news when we are not staffed in newsrooms or saved from layoffs?
Good.
It creates a fractured news economy where, instead of going to MSNBC or The Washington Post for information, people start getting their news from social media accounts that don’t always show the full or even accurate picture.
Each time is harder. But I do know a lot of people who rely on accounts like The Shade Room or The Spiritual World for news.
A friend recently sent me a news clip from TSW and I had never heard of it.
