As part of the Center for Community Media’s (CCM) Black Media Initiative, we’re offering a map and directory of nearly 300 media outlets across the U.S. that primarily serve Black communities across the diaspora. With a national map that includes publications of multiple formats and topics, we are filling a long-existing void.
Black media has been historically classified as newspapers – often weekly – owned by an African-American publisher that print in cities with significant Black populations. We’ve included those – the vast majority of the list — alongside digital startups that cover niche topics, publications that serve West Indian and African audiences, radio stations, nonprofit newsrooms and more. You can sort the database by location, format, publication schedule, audience, ownership and contact information.
There are newer newspapers like Texas Metro News, a Black newspaper headquartered in Dallas that prints weekly and has been in circulation since 2012, side by side with legacy papers like the Michigan Chronicle in Detroit, which has been printed since 1936. Black Catholic Messenger, a digital news service amplifying the stories of Black Catholics in the U.S., is a publication that started in fall 2020, listed alongside the historic Final Call, the largest weekly paper serving Black Muslims. Radio stations that are part of the Black Information Network operated by iHeartRadio have space with legacy operations like WURD, a Black-owned news talk radio in Philadelphia. And that’s before you get to innovative digital platforms such as The TRiiBE in Chicago, or QCityMetro in Charlotte, NC.
But we know this list is not complete. In combing across the country for this list, we know we might be missing some publications. We’d like to include the broadest swath of publication formats – that includes podcasts, magazines, Medium – and Substack-hosted publications, and more – here, so if you think you should be included, please let us know: ccm@journalism.cuny.edu.