The Catch-22 of Buying Black Media
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“All things being equal, we’d have no problem supporting” black-owned media, said the CMO, but “a lot of the true African-American owned media companies are small and very decentralized. That doesn’t fit our strategy of needing to have a national reach. We have looked at some of the options, but the delivery is so small in relation to cost it doesn’t fit our strategy.”
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Scale affects pricing
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Some of the biggest names in black media today actually are owned by corporate titans. The most notable example is BET, which founder Bob Johnson sold to Viacom for $3 billion in 2000. Then there’s Essence: Time Warner’s publishing arm took full ownership of the legacy brand in January 2005.
But the most dismal rate of media ownership among African-Americans is in TV. Only five African-Americans own full-power commercial TV stations; they collectively own eight out of 1,379 commercials stations nationwide.
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Minority ownership in decline
The minority-ownership rate in TV has plummeted in recent years, falling nearly 70% in the past decade, according to a 2007 Free Press study.
Recent declines in TV ownership are attributed to the bankruptcy in May 2007 of a single company: New York-based Granite Broadcasting, which operated nine stations in seven states. That’s not to say that TV ownership among African-Americans was ever strong.
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But TV is certainly not the only place where black-owned media outlets are in decline. Newspapers historically have been an area of strength for black ownership. Blacks published newspapers as early as the 1820s, and there were 250 newspapers operated by African-Americans by 1950, according to a report by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council.
No black dailies left
Yet today, there is no longer a daily black-owned newspaper. The last daily black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, cut back to a weekly schedule in February.
And since 2000, the industry’s trade group, the Black Press of America, has seen its membership decline to 189 weekly newspapers from 300. National weekly circulation for its members has dropped to 250,000 from a high of 500,000 in 2000, according to John Smith Sr., chairman of the trade group. Mr. Smith, publisher of The Atlanta Inquirer, a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 42,000 (down from 60,000 two years ago), blames the internet for the circulation declines.
Indeed, with advertisers stampeding toward digital marketing, it’s hard to overlook the fact that not a single legacy black media brand has made a successful transition to the online world. Consider EbonyJet.com: Its traffic is so small it doesn’t register with ComScore or Nielsen. The website aggregating the biggest black audience online is Time Warner’s Black Voices. The second-most popular is BlackPlanet.com—owned by five Asians.
But Eric Blankfein, senior VP-channel insights director at Horizon Media, New York, said advertisers should not just look at traffic figures, noting that there are opportunities to gain more credibility with the audience by buying in outlets owned by African-Americans.
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In 2001, Black Press launched a national network and news portal, BlackPressUSA.com, “to bridge the gap as far as technology is concerned for member newspapers,” Mr. Smith said. Despite the efforts, the site has garnered little traffic and has yet to register with ComScore and Nielsen/NetRatings. Mr. Smith said the site gets about 10,000 hits a week.
Site draws major advertisers
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It’s not limited to newspapers. The legacy magazine brands—Ebony, Jet, Essence and Black Enterprise, all black-owned except Essence—are struggling to gain new readers. Average circulation was essentially flat from 2006 to 2007 for all four, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.
The low rate of media ownership in broadcast has been blamed by some on the policies of the FCC, including David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. “The relative success of minorities in the weekly-newspaper industry was possible because no federal agency acted as the gatekeeper of newsprint and ink,” Mr. Honig wrote in a recent report. “In broadcasting . . . the FCC’s regulatory policies ensured that media companies could not cross the line from print to broadcasting.”
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That’s not to say ownership rates in radio are stellar today, even if they do surpass that of TV; African-Americans own just 3.4% of the full-power commercial broadcast radio stations nationwide.
The largest black-owned radio company is Radio One, based in Lanham, Md. The company operates 53 radio stations in 17 urban markets but has been struggling of late. On March 23, it announced plans to sell KRBV-FM in Los Angeles for $137.5 million, using some of the proceeds to invest in its internet strategy, according to Chief Content Officer-Interactive Smokey Fontaine. “If we can reach more African-Americans than our competitors at the other big media companies online, we can then offer more reach to advertisers.”
Perceived value
But to some, it’s more than a question of reach. “Media targeted to African-Americans is not valued to the degree that other media is,” said Earl Graves Jr., president-CEO of Black Enterprise, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, which has a subscription base of 525,000 and an estimated 4 million readers.
Since 1970, the magazine has published an annual list of the top 100 black-owned businesses, including media companies. After the takeover of Essence by Time, Mr. Graves removed the legacy media brand from the list. Despite the magazine’s tough stance on what constitutes a black-media property, Mr. Graves questioned whether efforts such as the NAACP’s survey does black-owned media any favors, especially in reshaping marketer misconceptions of the value of targeting black consumers.
“It’s counterproductive when people feel they are filling it out under duress,” he said, suggesting instead the argument for spending more on black media should be made on economic grounds. “Tell me how this makes sense: 15% to 20% of your business is coming from this market but you spend less than half to one-half percent of your marketing budget on it.”
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(Posted on April 10, 2008)
Comments
Of course they are. Only a tiny handful of blacks in the world could run an enterprise of any scale like this. The most likely scenario for a black run network of this sort is dramatic failure followed by bankruptcy.
Posted by at 6:57 PM on April 10
Why bother? The “mainstream” media is increasingly black, so the concept of a uniquely “black” media is almost redundant.
Posted by Question Diversity at 8:06 PM on April 10
I dont look forward to the time when more blacks own the media. In Berkeley, Calif. there is a black oriented public radio station KPOO, I call it K-doodoo.Years ago, they played a constant barrage of kill Whitey rap so called music, and it was the worst kill Whitey hate rap ever made.It would make the worst of the kill Whitey rap played today seem tame.They even publicly demanded the release of the Zebra murder suspects after they were arrested.
Posted by Peejay in Frisco at 8:27 PM on April 10
i guess the SBA will have to make a “MINORITY” or MWE program so those with the lowest IQ can have “equal opportunity”
Posted by enraged at 9:26 PM on April 10
I’m missing something here. Every time I turn on the TV, blacks are in nearly every commercial. It makes no difference whatsoever what the programming is. They in featured in ads for all manner of food products, home-improvement stores, medicines, even underwear ads (think Michael Jordan).
Advertisers go out of their way to target black consumers.
It appears that the effort only matters when it is channeled through the black media, is that it?
Posted by kitty at 9:33 PM on April 10
History is repeating itself. I know collectors who who search for black films. In the 1920s through the the 1940’s there were films aimed at blacks with all black casts. In the 50’s blacks lost interest. They prefered the high quality white films. Since you they did not make money, no one wants to finace them. There was an interest in the 70’s with the superfly movies, but that even passed. Spike Lee is trying his best to revive this lost art and he just can’t do it. Black films can only succeed if white people want to see them.
Posted by flyingtiger at 12:44 AM on April 11
Thanks to the internet, newspaper and magazine sales across the board have been plummeting.
That’s one reason for the decline of black newspapers and mags.
Posted by Madison Grant at 1:03 AM on April 11
“Advertisers go out of their way to target black consumers.
It appears that the effort only matters when it is channeled through the black media, is that it?”
Posted by kitty at 9:33 PM on April 10
> Kitty, I really think that it is more than that. I think it is part of a trent to over-include blacks so that whites can get used to having blacks (and other minorities) marrying their children and being not just their neighbors, but in their families. And I think it is working all too well.
Posted by Whiteplight at 2:04 PM on April 11
The only type of media available is ‘diversity media’ - which means it all caters to blacks anyway. It would be great if there were white media, black media and diverse media. When I feel like watching something, I go rent a video of entertainment from a more intelligent era.
Posted by Civilized Neighbor at 4:58 PM on April 11
Low quality, poorly run operations tend to die off once better ones get established.
Posted by Dumbo at 5:27 PM on April 11
This whole “black-owned business” thing is bogus, because they imply corporate ownership of something as being “white” owned. Which it is NOT. Corporations are owned GLOBALLY by MILLIONS of stockholders of ALL races.
An ever growing proportion of business is owned by corporations. Constantly once privately owned companies are bought out by corporations.
Posted by at 12:15 AM on April 12
“I think it is part of a trent to over-include blacks so that whites can get used to having blacks (and other minorities) marrying their children”
Why would the powers-that-be wan’t that when their own kids are white? I read this ridiculous nonsense all of the time. Someone finally explain it to me.
Posted by at 10:57 AM on April 12
Mugabe has billions to invest in black african enterprises and prints more high denomination notes every month. Perhaps he would be interested in investing in some of these african-american media outlets. That is, once he has finished counting ballot papers, something else he seems to have aplenty.
Posted by Yorkshireman at 11:16 AM on April 12
“Why would the powers-that-be wan’t that when their own kids are white? I read this ridiculous nonsense all of the time. Someone finally explain it to me.”
The elite want the lower and middle classes to interbreed with blacks and other minorities so that they and their children will remain on the top of the food chain and in control.
Posted by at 8:42 PM on April 12
The white owned and white operated media are so anti-white they may as well be black owned.
Posted by WR the elder at 6:42 PM on April 13
10:57 AM: Why would the powers that be want Whites to breed with non-Whites? The powers that be exclude themselves from every inconvenience and insult that is dumped on the White masses. Will Hilary’s daughter ever be denied a position so that a diversity mandate can be carried out? Do Hollywood producer’s grandchildren go to urban public schools? Would Bill Gates’ kids ever go to prison for anything short of murder? We can observe that the government and most other large institutions, particularly the mass media, have anti-White, pro-Black and pro-foreigner policies. We can only speculate why that is, but it’s absurd or dishonest to claim that the PTB don’t wish our destruction. They are not stupid or ignorant, they are fully aware of the damage being done to this country by non-White immigration and by affirmative action, and they know themselves to be exempt.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 10:18 PM on April 13