An Examination of the Black Community Online (Part 2)

The people in this community rely on the mainstream media and a multitude of other news sources to get their information. Some examples include the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post. While targeted news sources like Essence magazine and its website, Black America Web, BlackNews.com and AOL Black voices all provide relevant news to African-Americans. The members of my online community are interested in topics such as politics, race relations, criminal and social justice.

Jason Green, creator of the Facebook group 1,000,000 black students, said he started the group after taking a class called “Racism in America” and reading about certain incidents he felt weren’t being publicized by the mainstream media.

“While I was taking that course, I was getting really emotional about things that I wasn’t aware of,” Green said. “At the time, I [also] read a story about a [black] man in Texas who was the victim of a racial beating. He had Down syndrome and he got beat up and it bothered me that nobody knew about that at the time.”

Though Green said he watches CNN, he believes the mainstream media doesn’t do a thorough job of covering issues concerning the black community. He relies on news sources like BET.com, BlackNews.com and Black Enterprise magazine and its website to get news. The creation of 1,000,000 black students was a way to remedy this lack of targeted information.

“Facebook is the perfect way to just network with people and to spread news amongst a large group of people,” Green said. “I thought if you can allow people to see what’s going on in society, they’ll be more aware and more equipped to prevent it from happening again.”

1,000,000 Black Students does not yet have that many members. Almost 118,000 students have joined since Green started the group in March of 2006. Recent postings have addressed the topic of supporting African-American-owned businesses, what they referred to as keeping wealth within the black community. Members have posted videos from YouTube that address this topic. Members have posted over 22,000 discussion topics, some of which include the prevalence of single-parent households in the black community and poverty in urban areas. As can be expected, some people have posted topics that don’t concern a wider audience. One person gave a birthday greeting to a friend and others have used the discussion board to post profanity. Many of the posts do a lot of linking to the original sources of information, so the discussion board serves as means to channel information.

Horace Coleman, moderator for ThinkTank and member of Club Black Web, said both groups are responsible for channeling information that may be ignored otherwise. ThinkTank, which has 129 members and has a mailing list, focuses on general news, politics and health information. Recent postings have focused the Jena 6 case, high mortality rates for cancer, and Barack Obama’s campaign.

Coleman said he tries to examine popular culture issues from a different perspective. One notable example is a posting he wrote about the film American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington. He said the mainstream media glorified the movie about a successful African-American drug dealer without examining how these illicit activities affected the black community.

“I like to find the back story to things, not just things that are in the mainstream media,” Coleman said.” That kind of thing is beyond what they do.”

Ray Ausetkmt, who reads 7,000 RSS Feeds a day, including feeds from papers like the New York Times and USA Today, said she has come to rely on non-traditional news sources–particularly information provided by fellow members of online communities like Club Black Web and ThinkTank. She said recent issues, like violence and Mogadishu, Somalia and almost 500 deaths in Darfur last week, have not been covered extensively by traditional news outlets.

“That’s why groups like Club Black Web and ThinkTank exist,” Ausetkmt said. “We pull in people who can pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say what needs to be said and syndicate it to sources that need to hear it. We don’t care about Reuters and AP.”

“Reuters and AP doesn’t have our type of syndication.”