🔊 Introducing new “Conversations” and re-introducing “Mindful Black Journalism”
by Sandra Hannebohm
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The newsletter's mission is to focus specifically on content by and for Black people so that we can engage with the news without feeling exhausted, frustrated, and defeated.
The phrase “Twice As Good” refers to a common belief in the Black community that Black people have to work much harder than white people to achieve the same level of success. To help Black journalists overcome this challenge and improve journalism overall, I believe that journalism training should include mindfulness practices and ethics.
Twice As Good Media’s mission is to spread mindful practices and resources for journalists and the people who engage with their work, so that engaging with the news can be a constructive and healing experience instead of an exercise in futility and paralysis.
The Mindful Black Journalism newsletter is my first offering to help toward that goal. It’s also how I demonstrate that mindfulness can inform high quality journalism.
The mission of the newsletter is to focus that energy on content by and for Black people, so that we can engage with the news without feeling exhausted, frustrated, and defeated.
It's all about mindful journalistic narratives on Black life in North America.
In the beginning I just wanted to start a Black journalism platform, but it became clear to me that the kind of mindful narratives I create are not only for Black people, nor are Black stories only for Black benefit. Liberation for us, is liberation for everyone.
I saw about a million things that could be done in media to improve the Black experience with news. I saw a lot of needs, just in the Black media space in Canada and the U.S. alone, and I knew I could not actually solve each one.
At the very least, it’s very clear that in Canada we need more Black media, period.
In the U.S. there are over 200 independent Black news outlets. But when I was looking around, I didn't see much variety in terms of style and tone, or journalistic methods. Many are local outlets doing news in a straightforward news voice, with a little twist. They usually rely heavily on advertisements, yet they never seem to think they have enough, and narratives are incredibly rare.
This is just my observation based on market research over the last year, so I could be wrong, but it appears to me that we have the opposite issue in Canada. In the U.S. there’s a lot of Black owned news, yet in Canada our few outlets span a wider variety of editorial styles and coverage topics.
In Canada, among the small number of Black indie publishers there is great diversity of style and content. Pineapple Express Media (NS/ON) is bringing national attention to the long underrated hip hop scene in Nova Scotia. BlackLantic podcast (NB), Black in the Maritimes (NB), The Black Collective Media (PEI), and The Resolve (TO) each bring their own flare to amplifying Black voices and their lived experiences on a wide range of topics from news and current affairs to policy and culture. There’s also Toned Magazine, focused on arts and culture, and Black Dollar Magazine focuses on the economy. Within this small group (and hopefully more to be added to list) there is lots of diversity.
Each of us brings our own unique value to what we do, shining light on different aspects of Black life. They all fill gaps in Canadian media, yet the founders I talked to said they didn't see themselves as journalists at all! Even if they'd been doing journalism for years, it was usually because they weren't formally trained.
Twice As Good means improving the Black media landscape for ourselves as Black people, and for journalism in general. We want more Black journalists who feel confident and welcome in this industry. We want journalism to become accessible as a profession, and we want news to be meaningful when people engage with it.
Mindful journalistic practices help to create meaningful narratives on the realities we face as Black people in North America, whether you're a trained journalist or not. By doing so, we achieve something twice as good as fast news.
