URL Media Secures $1M as it Continues to Center Communities of Color Amid a Volatile Political Climate and Ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election

URL Media Partners and Staff. Photo by Hari Adivarekar.

The $1M Grant is made possible by Knight Foundation

September 7, 2023 - New York, NY - URL Media, a network of media organizations that serve, support and center communities of color and whose leadership and teams represent these populations, secured a $1M investment from Knight Foundation to strengthen its revenue generation, audience development and content amplification operations for its growing BIPOC network of 21 partners. The URL Media partners, a group of influential media organizations, include Black Girl Times, Black Voice News, Documented, Epicenter-NYC, Immigrantly Podcast, La Noticia, Native News, Our Body Politic, Outlier Media, Palabra, Pulso, Prism, PushBlack, Sahan Journal, Scalawag, Scroll Stack, TBN24, The Haitian Times, The Oklahoma Eagle, Watch the Yard, and WURD Radio.

“As we enter the 2024 presidential election cycle in an already volatile climate for our communities and amid a fragile state of media, the most trusted sources will unequivocally be the community news organizations that URL represents. We cannot center communities of color without significant investments in diverse local news. This $1M grant is an important step forward in ensuring that community media organizations that are led by journalists of color and represent the rich diversity that make up this country are supported fully, frequently and with urgency,” said Sara M. Lomax, co-founder and president of URL Media. “This Knight Foundation grant, specifically designated to BIPOC media, will be critical to advancing social justice, mobilizing Black and Brown communities and building economic opportunities for organizations that have been historically marginalized, overlooked and underfunded. The moment is now and we are already late.”

URL Media co-founders S. Mitra Kalita and Sara Lomax. Photo by Zamani Feelings.

“Journalism that understands the nuances of engaging and informing this nation’s communities of color—Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous and so many others—is best served by the media that represent these communities. This is precisely the critical work that URL Media and its network partners lead day in and day out. The $1M Knight Foundation grant builds on our efforts to strengthen community local news, and center our Black and Brown communities as we continue to be impacted by racial rollbacks,” said S. Mitra Kalita, co-founder and CEO of URL Media. “Our hope is that this signals the importance of investing in media organizations like URL whose communities trust to inform and uplift. URL Media exemplifies a business model that’s working in a challenging media climate: diversified revenue streams, direct audiences, multiplatform, multicultural and rooted in collaboration versus competition. That we are diverse is no coincidence. If we truly want to foster racial equity, prioritizing Black and Brown communities needs to be a regular, fundamental part of business, going beyond election cycles and occasional statements of support.”

“Our support for URL Media makes clear our commitment to sustainable news organizations that represent the diverse communities they support,” said Duc Luu, Program Director at Knight Foundation. “Their work to strengthen revenue generation, audience development and content amplification operations has the potential to transform its growing BIPOC network.”

URL Media will use the investment to strengthen and expand its targeted ad network, onboard more BIPOC publishers, and develop revenue-focused solutions for its partners. The grant will further support and expand the already great work by the network partners to create greater sustainability.

URL Media was founded in 2021 with the goal to build a decentralized, multi-platform network of high-performing Black and Brown media organizations. Growing from eight to 21, the members consist of exceptional news outlets representing a diverse mix of culture, format, geography and audience that amplify each other’s content and share revenues as a way to build greater sustainability for BIPOC media. URL Media has almost tripled in partners, doubled their revenue and grown its collective audience to 27 million users.

CONTACT: press@url-media.com.

URL Media hires Ariam Alula as Audience Manager

Ariam Alula (how to say it) brings a range of skills and interests to URL Media, including newsletter curation, audience strategy and research, and measuring and tracking impact. Most recently, she has consulted with several organizations in the journalism support space, including the Institute for Nonprofit News, the Public Square Team at Democracy Fund, Online News Association and Women Do News. She has also written for the American Press Institute’s Need to Know newsletter. Alula is also a proud graduate of the engagement journalism program at the Craig Newmark Journalism School at the City University of New York.

On my first mentor, Henry Fuhrmann

Senior Recruiter Sonali Kohli here. I want to talk to you this week about the joy of having and being a mentor, and the grief of losing a mentor. I want to talk to you in particular about Henry Fuhrmann, who was my first journalism mentor. Henry died earlier this month at the age of 65, a few years after entering semi-retirement. He had so much left. Henry and I met when I was an extremely eager (perhaps too eager) student at the University of California - Los Angeles [UCLA]. As an undergraduate, I went to the Los Angeles Times building downtown every chance I could — for everything from tours to events and panels. At one such panel, I met Henry, who was an assistant managing editor overseeing the copy desk. At our college newspaper, the Daily Bruin, we were grappling with a decision (remember that this was circa 2011): my editor and I wanted to honor a source's request to use they/them pronouns in a story, which we'd never done. Neither had the Los Angeles Times, yet. But Henry believed in respecting a person's identity and using language as a tool to do that. He told me that journalists must strive for accuracy, and it is reasonable to deduce that the name or pronouns a person uses for themselves are the most accurate. He supported our decision to respect the source's identity and then used the Bruin as an example when the LA Times had that conversation about pronouns not long after.

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Andaiye brings a unique cross-section of professional experiences to the role. She joins URL Media from her own company, Angle Content, which helps companies and publications exceed their audience and customer acquisition goals through strategic content planning, production and distribution. Before that, Andaiye spent more than a decade working at high-performing ad tech startups in roles spanning account management, product management, and content strategy. And from 2013 to 2019 Andaiye ran her own hyperlocal publication, Brick City Live, which covered her beloved hometown of Newark, NJ.

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