Capital B, written for and by Black people, launches as a nonprofit newsroom

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https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/capital-b-written-for-and-by-black-people-launches-as-a-nonprofit-newsroom/

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Co-founders Akoto Ofori-Atta and Lauren Williams published a “part welcome, part explainer” for new readers. It’s worth reading in full, and the part where Ofori-Atta and Williams explain their thinking behind the startup’s business model caught our eye. (It echoes some of what they told me soon after they left The Trace and Vox, respectively, to found Capital B: They knew relying on advertising alone wouldn’t cut it.)

News is important. What has been lost — and what’s left — hasn’t always been great for Black people. But having nothing is very bad for our future. What rises instead is low-quality or outright false information, sometimes that explicitly targets us. This has consequences for voting. And it has consequences for public health.

When we started a news organization, we wanted to make sure we were building something that was going to fill the holes in local news for Black people. And we also wanted to build something that was going to last. We knew that the future for the type of reporting we wanted to do was not one that primarily relied on ads for all of our revenue. So we are a 501c(3) nonprofit, and our revenue model is a diverse one that includes philanthropic funding from foundations, individuals, corporations, and members, as well as ads and sponsorships.

And we’ve organized in a way to minimize the cost of our local newsrooms, centralizing all of our business and operational functions. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we open a new local newsroom, and we can save our resources for the journalism.

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