Black-Owned Newspapers Dropped From 300 to 50 — Now Algorithms Write Your Narrative

On March 16, 1827, in a small office on Church Street in lower Manhattan, two free Black men — John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish — published the first issue of Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans in the United States. Their editorial in the inaugural issue contained a line that reads, nearly two hundred years later, as both a declaration of independence and a prophecy of everything that would go wrong when Black people lost control of their own narrative: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” That sentence is the founding charter of the Black press. It is also its epitaph, because the institution that Russwurm and Cornish created — an institution that would grow to more than three hundred newspapers, shape the Great Migration, catalyze the civil rights movement, and produce some of the most important journalism in American history — has been reduced to approximately fifty publications, most of them struggling to survive, and the vacuum left by their collapse has been filled by algorithms that optimize not for truth, or accountability, or community, but for engagement, which is a polite word for outrage.

To understand what was lost, you must first understand what the Black press was. It was not simply a collection of newspapers that covered Black communities. It was the central nervous system of Black political life in America. In an era when white newspapers either ignored Black existence or covered it exclusively through the lens of crime and pathology, the Black press provided something that no other institution could: a mirror in which Black people could see themselves as full human beings, and a megaphone through which they could speak to each other about their own conditions on their own terms.

The Great Migration’s Secret Engine

The Chicago Defender, founded by Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, is the single most underappreciated institution in the history of Black America. At its peak in the 1940s, the Defender had a national circulation exceeding 200,000 — extraordinary for any newspaper, astonishing for a Black-owned publication operating without access to mainstream advertising revenue. But the Defender’s circulation figures understate its actual reach by a factor of five or more, because copies were shared, read aloud in churches and barbershops, and passed from hand to hand in the rural South where they functioned less as newspapers and more as dispatches from a world that Southern Black people had been told did not exist.

The Defender did something that no government program, no political party, and no civil rights organization accomplished at the same scale: it told Black people in the South that there was a better life available in the North, and it told them how to get there. Abbott ran a sustained campaign encouraging Black Southern migration that was so effective it alarmed the white power structure throughout the South. Mississippi and other states attempted to ban the Defender. Railroad workers who distributed it were threatened. Copies were confiscated from newsstands and post offices. The mere possession of the Defender was, in parts of the deep South, sufficient cause for a Black person to be visited by white men with intentions that did not need to be made explicit.

The Pittsburgh Courier rivaled the Defender in influence and exceeded it in some respects. During World War II, the Courier launched the Double V Campaign — victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home — which became the organizing framework for a generation of Black activism. The campaign was journalism as political action: every week, the Courier published stories about Black soldiers fighting and dying for a country that denied them the rights they were defending, and it demanded that the contradiction be resolved. The Double V Campaign did not wait for the civil rights movement. It was the civil rights movement, conducted in newsprint, years before Brown v. Board or the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Ida B. Wells and the Power of Investigation

Before there was investigative journalism as a recognized discipline, there was Ida B. Wells. In 1892, after three of her friends — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart — were lynched in Memphis for the crime of operating a grocery store that competed with a white-owned business, Wells used her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, to do what no white journalist would: she investigated lynching. She collected data. She cross-referenced the stated justifications for lynchings with the actual circumstances, and she proved, with meticulous documentation, that the vast majority of lynchings had nothing to do with the defense of white womanhood — the standard justification — and everything to do with the economic suppression of Black success.

Wells’ pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” was journalism of the highest order: data-driven, sourced, unflinching, and directed toward accountability. For this work, her newspaper office was destroyed by a white mob, and she was told that she would be lynched if she returned to Memphis. She relocated to Chicago and continued her work. The point is not simply that Wells was courageous, though she was. The point is that the Black press provided a platform for investigative journalism that held power accountable at a time when the white press was either complicit in that power or indifferent to its exercise.

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
— Ida B. Wells

The Collapse

The decline of the Black press began, paradoxically, with the success of the civil rights movement. As mainstream white publications began covering Black communities — however inadequately — and as the legal barriers to Black participation in mainstream institutions fell, the Black press lost two of its three essential functions: it was no longer the only source of information about Black life, and it was no longer the only venue through which Black voices could reach a public audience. What it retained, and what nothing has replaced, was the third function: accountability journalism rooted in community knowledge, conducted by people who lived in the communities they covered and who would be answerable to those communities for what they published.

The advertising model accelerated the collapse. Black newspapers had always operated on thin margins because mainstream advertisers — the automobile manufacturers, department stores, and consumer goods companies that funded white publications — refused to buy advertising in Black publications, or offered rates that were a fraction of what they paid for equivalent white audiences. A Nielsen study estimated that Black media has been undervalued by advertisers by approximately $5 billion per year — not because Black audiences are smaller or less valuable, but because the advertising industry, like most American industries, systematically undervalues Black attention, Black consumption, and Black economic participation.

The digital transition delivered the killing blow. As advertising revenue migrated from print to digital, newspapers of all kinds suffered, but Black newspapers suffered disproportionately because they had thinner margins, smaller digital operations, and less access to the venture capital and foundation funding that sustained white digital-first publications through their early unprofitable years. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of Black-owned newspapers fell from approximately 300 to roughly 50, and most of the survivors publish weekly or biweekly rather than daily, with skeleton staffs that cannot produce the investigative journalism that once made them indispensable.

What Replaced It

The vacuum left by the collapse of the Black press has been filled by social media, and the substitution is catastrophic. Social media provides some of what the Black press provided — a platform for Black voices, a space for community conversation, a mechanism for rapid information sharing — and none of what made the Black press essential. Social media has no editorial standards. It has no fact-checking. It has no institutional memory. It has no investigative capacity. It has no accountability to the communities it serves because it does not serve communities; it serves advertisers, and it serves them by maximizing engagement, which it achieves by amplifying content that provokes the strongest emotional reactions, which is to say: outrage, fear, and conflict.

The algorithmic amplification of outrage has particular consequences for Black communities. When the primary source of information about Black life is a platform that rewards extreme content and punishes nuance, the internal conversations that communities need to have — about education, economic development, political strategy, cultural preservation — are drowned out by whatever is trending, which is almost always a crisis, a conflict, or a spectacle. The Black press enabled sustained, long-form engagement with complex issues. Social media produces a constant churn of reaction and counter-reaction that generates enormous heat and no light.

The problem is compounded by the demographics of mainstream media. In 2023, according to the American Society of News Editors, newsrooms at major publications were approximately 77% white. The journalists who cover Black communities for the New York Times, Washington Post, and major network news operations are, in many cases, people who do not live in those communities, do not attend those churches, do not shop at those stores, and do not send their children to those schools. They arrive with notebooks and leave with stories, and the communities they cover have no recourse when the coverage is inaccurate, incomplete, or shaped by assumptions that reveal more about the journalist than the community.

The Bright Spots

The news is not entirely bleak. A new generation of Black-owned and Black-led media organizations is emerging, and some of them are doing work that would make Abbott and Wells proud. Capital B, founded by Lauren Williams and Akoto Ofori-Atta, is building a national Black news organization with local bureaus that combine investigative journalism with community accountability. The Marshall Project, while not exclusively focused on Black communities, has produced some of the most important journalism on criminal justice and its disproportionate impact on Black Americans. WORD In Black, a collaborative of ten legacy Black newspapers, is attempting to build a digital infrastructure that preserves the community journalism tradition while adapting to the economics of the internet. The Black Star Network is developing a Black-owned streaming platform that aims to provide an alternative to the algorithmic content farms that currently dominate Black media consumption.

These organizations face the same economic challenges that killed their predecessors: an advertising market that systematically undervalues Black audiences, a philanthropy sector that prefers to fund programs about Black communities rather than media controlled by Black communities, and a digital economy that rewards scale over depth and engagement over accountability. Their survival is not guaranteed. Their existence is necessary.

What Must Be Built

The restoration of the Black press is not a nostalgia project. It is an infrastructure project, as essential to the health of Black communities as housing, education, or economic development, because without reliable, accountable, community-controlled information systems, none of those other projects can function effectively. You cannot organize a community that does not have shared, trusted sources of information. You cannot hold elected officials accountable without journalists who will investigate their performance and report the results to the people who elected them. You cannot build a coherent political strategy when your primary information source is an algorithm designed to fragment attention and amplify discord.

The business model must change. Subscription-based revenue, which has sustained publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post through the digital transition, has been underexplored in Black media, partly because of the assumption — contradicted by data — that Black audiences will not pay for news. Cooperative ownership models, in which the community itself owns the publication through membership, have shown promise in other contexts and are ideally suited to institutions whose value lies in community trust. Philanthropic funding, if structured to support editorial independence rather than programmatic outcomes, can provide the bridge capital that allows new organizations to build audiences before becoming financially self-sustaining.

Russwurm and Cornish knew in 1827 what the algorithm does not know and cannot learn: that a people who do not control their own narrative do not control their own destiny. The Black press was never just about information. It was about sovereignty — the sovereignty to define your own reality, name your own problems, celebrate your own achievements, and hold your own leaders accountable, without permission from or deference to institutions that have never had your interests at heart. That sovereignty was built over a century and a half by publishers and journalists who risked their lives and their livelihoods to tell the truth. It was lost in a generation to economics, technology, and the seductive convenience of platforms that give you a voice while taking your narrative. Rebuilding it is not optional. It is the prerequisite for everything else.