The Black press has always faced an inequitable funding landscape. Its future can’t be the same

“It has long been our anxious wish to see, in this slave-holding, slave-trading, and negro-hating land, a printing-press and paper permanently established under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression,” Frederick Douglass wrote in the first issue of The North Star, printed in December 1847. 

That became a prescient thesis statement for the Black press, which from its inception has been fundamentally opposed to oppression and simultaneously concerned with correcting anti-Black narratives while advancing stories of Black abundance and independence. Still, throughout its history, what we know as the Black press has battled to be equitably funded. 

That struggle is also presently reflected in today’s environment of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion as the Trump administration continues attacking institutions created to benefit Black people. A January 2026 report from Journal-isms found that as a collective, the Black press lost 80% of its revenue since the administration entered power.

Much of today’s Black-owned media is sustained through advertising revenue, including legacy Black outlets that have stopped print operations. This mode of operation illustrates that Black media in general — not just legacy operations — is at an inflection point, particularly if it seeks to stay both Black-funded and Black-run: They must choose between having an actual staff with benefits or a rotating cast of freelancers with few, if any, labor protections. 

I know this, because in my brief time as a freelance contributor for Black Enterprise, I lacked insurance and benefits.

But the framework of depending on advertising revenue — particularly to pay freelancers, who already are exposed to the whims of their contractors — isn’t unique, and it’s an arrangement that fails both Black freelance writers and the Black publications that often employ their services. In a dire situation for today’s Black media, Black publications must take cues from the diverse funding of the early Black press to reject this outdated and exploitative model. And funders who purport to care for a free press must show that by investing in the Black press, which has long been a bulwark against censorship and racism. 

Early Black press was funded through diverse sources

Early Black publications kept themselves in printing through varied funding models, from self-funding to the collective group economics model, to other presses being funded by multi-racial abolitionist groups via an early version of philanthropy, and a mix of individual donations and advertisements. 

Freedom’s Journal in New York City, considered the progenitor of the Black press, began in 1827 — the same year slavery was abolished in New York. Founded by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, funding for the outlet came from a group of Black New Yorkers who wanted the concerns of the city’s Black citizenry reflected in a paper printed for and by Black people in America. 

Black newspapers like The Philadelphia Tribune, The Afro (AFRO American Newspapers), The Chicago Defender, the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, and the Atlanta Daily World, received financial support through subscriptions, selling advertising space, funding from churches, or through individual investments. 

Meanwhile, Douglass’ The North Star was funded through his speaking tour in Great Britain and Ireland. Like Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The North Star was also self-published and self-owned. 

Unlike Freedom’s Journal, it was concerned with Black self-determination, and had no affection for the Liberian neo-colonization project mounted by the American Colonization Society with the blessing of James Monroe and James Madison, enslavers with deeply hypocritical positions on slavery.

Self-publication persisted in addition to the formal creation of newspapers and periodicals. Writer David Walker self-published an 1829 treatise as a scathing response to the American Colonization Society’s motives, rooted in the tradition of the Black press. 

“Here is a demonstrative proof, of a plan got up by a gang of slave-holders to select the free people of colour from among the slaves, that our more miserable brethren may be the better secured in ignorance and wretchedness, to work their farms and dig their mines, and thus go on enriching the Christians with their blood and groans,” Walker wrote in the 1829 treatise.

The Civil War decimated the nascent journalism industry in general, and like the old adage goes: If white America catches a cold, Black folks get pneumonia. 

According to the Ohio Black Press in the 19th Century, a collaboration from George Mason University, very few Black outlets survived the Civil War — a bitter companion piece to work produced by wartime Black outlets publishing the names of Black soldiers who died, with some remarking that Black soldiers were more at risk of death than their white counterparts. 

Postwar, however, in conjunction with the institution of Reconstruction, the Black press was resurrected.  Once restricted to the northern states of the Union because of slavery throughout the South, the newfound emancipation of formerly enslaved people meant a new audience to expose to a now resurgent Black press. However, this did not necessarily mean that the white press was entirely willing to cede its power. 

Today’s funding landscape means hard decisions for Black press’s future

Today’s landscape sees billionaires buying up local news outlets with national reach like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and, particularly in the case of the Post, increasingly running op-ed drivel aligning with the interests of new owner Jeff Bezos, who initiated deep cuts that disproportionately affected Black reporters and other reporters of color. 

In the 81 years since the founding of Ebony Magazine, the four national legacy Black media outlets have undergone seismic shifts. Black Enterprise no longer prints magazines. Essence has gone from being Black-owned to being owned by white organizations (Time Inc.) and back to being Black-owned. Ebony has gone through controversy — namely, the 2017-2019 social media campaign #EbonyOwes. That campaign, created by freelance writers, photographers, illustrators and editors, was aimed at getting the publication to pay numerous overdue invoices. After a collective suit, the legacy publication agreed to a nearly $80,000 settlement, which Chicago Magazine declared was a “lesson for media everywhere.”

Several Black journalists who have worked at other mainstream news outlets have, due to the unBlackening of workplaces like MSNBC, CBS, and CNN, elected to go independent. But that route often relies on those figures having established profiles, as with Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and Joy Ann Reid. 

And advertisement revenue has remained a cornerstone of budgets in the mosaic of funding for the Black press, leaving Black-owned outlets — especially smaller, local Black media — vulnerable as the Trump administration pushes back on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies intended for desegregation. Due to the Trump administration’s targeting of diversity, equity and inclusion, businesses that formerly were willing to invest their money into Black-owned media are no longer incentivized to see those outlets as a valuable return on their investment, and have opted, out of what seems to be cowardice, to put their advertising dollars elsewhere.

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Related: After 2020, Black-led newsrooms ask: Where is the long-term support?

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Denise Rolark Barnes, the owner and publisher of the The Washington Informer indicated as much in an interview with News 4, saying that advertisers and other companies are becoming leery of spending their money on Black-owned outlets so they can avoid being potentially placed in the crosshairs of the administration.

“They’re still spending money, but they’re not spending money with anything that is anyway connected with DEI,” Barnes told News 4. “When it comes to these advertising budgets, we’re in that budget. We’re the DEI bucket.”

Many publications have strived to diversify funding for greater stability in recent years, following the footsteps of early Black press: Black-led collectives like Black Public Media, as their 2022 report notes, received financial support from a range of supporters: individual, anonymous donors, major journalism funders, corporations including Netflix, and place-based groups like the New York Community Trust.

In a similar vein, Capital B News issued its own three-year funding plan covering 2025-2028 in November 2025. Their plan, per their article, detailed some of their reasons for optimism, arguing that diversifying revenue “safeguards our editorial independence, putting us in stark contrast to news organizations that answer to media conglomerates or a single owner looking to serve other interests.” Some Black funders are aiming to support Black press, too: Last month, Onyx Impact partnered with the National Association of Black Journalists to launch a $500,000 fund with the intention of using it to support Black independent media. 

Onyx Impact’s CEO Esosa Osa called out organizations who claim to care about press freedom without supporting Black media, imploring them to support the Black press that has historically embodied freedom of the press while being underinvested in, divested from, and attacked by the federal government for daring to center the concerns of Black Americans. 

“It’s time for the pro-democracy community to put their money where their mouth is,” Osa told The Root.

The Onyx Impact program is unfortunately a rarity. Funder alliance Press Forward responded to critique and fears about its $500 million investment in local journalism by shifting to invest in work created by and centering Black and other journalists of color. Still, other outlets have argued the sum is just a drop in the bucket for sustainably funding local journalism. 

Ultimately, the Black press, already underfunded as it is, needs clear lines of funding that aren’t held up by bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Keeping the Black press alive is crucial as an agitator for justice 

From its very beginning, the Black press printed protest literature and slice-of-life content as a forceful correction of the historical record written by white racists and racist sympathizers. 

During the resurrection of the Black press post-Civil War, the dogged efforts of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as the editor of The Memphis Free Speech helped ensure that the stories circulated about Black folks included facts, not uncritical justifications of white mob rule in white outlets like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This commitment to media justice cost her the office of the newspaper in 1892, when a white mob, incensed by her efforts, set fire to the office — and threatened her life — after her investigative reporting on the lynchings of three Black men in Memphis. 

In 1910, the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, was founded and edited by W.E.B. DuBois, one of the titans of Black progressive thought of his day. It also provided a launching pad for many of the most notable writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, which functioned as a similar artistic counterpart to the Black press.

National Black legacy media outlets have also pushed for justice in their own way. Less than five years after Jet — a sister magazine to Ebony Magazine — first began printing, it became a touchpoint for the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 when its team chose to publish photos of the mangled face of Emmett Till after his mother, Mamie Mobley-Till, made the courageous decision to have an open casket funeral for her son. The photos created outrage in the Black community and Jet’s readership over Till’s lynching in Mississippi.

The legacy of the Black press has been carried forward today, through the collective founding of The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and through Black journalists doing the beautiful, necessary, vital work of reflecting their communities — locally, at outlets like Houston Defender, the Chicago Defender, Kansas City’s KC Defender, and The Triibe, and at a larger scale, like NewsOne, Essence, Scalawag Magazine and Project B. Myself and other Black freelancers work to criticize and correct dominant racist narratives while interrogating narratives of Black freedoms.

But in a world where corporate media mergers abound, resulting in the loss of jobs for several Black writers at outlets like Billboard, VIBE, and Rolling Stone, the Black press must exercise the imagination it has always had for a more just world through re-evaluating funding models. The Black press must be considerate of the writers they use to create their content and coverage. Otherwise, what are we doing but reproducing the harm that these white outlets visit on us, but in the name of cutting overhead, or whatever else we proclaim is a necessary evil? 

With racist, anti-Black gaps in coverage exposed again and again by the forebears of the Black press, the Kerner Commission, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the attacks on national news media from the White House, an independent and organized counterbalance is of vital importance. 

The importance of funding the Black media cannot be overstated. The history of the Black press is too important, the work is too vital, the people who engage in it have been tied to the struggle of Black folks in America for far too long for this current inflection point to spell the end of Black media as we know it. 

Any organization that purports to care about the freedom of the press, democracy, and a fair and free election should, by all rights, be pouring money into the Black press. Not only because of the important space that the Black press has always occupied, but because the return on this investment is a more educated, more readily engaged populace. As Wells-Barnett said, “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”

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Daniel Johnson is a freelance writer based in East Texas. His work can be found in Essence, Teen Vogue, Scalawag, Level, Black Youth Project, Black Enterprise, Texas Observer, and Prism.

This story was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.