Breaking: Essence Lays Off Digital Team

Via Journalsticks:  After relaunching their website last week, Essence magazine laid off its web team today citing budgetary reasons. “They told us it was downsizing,” says one Essence employee. “We’re very confused. We worked so hard for the relaunch.” Another insider tells J’sticks: “This is normal practice. Companies relaunch with new [site] schemes that allow them to [...]

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Black Media, Instead of Mimicking Blogs Why not just Acquire?

As of late we’ve seen so many traditional Black/Urban Media companies either redesign as blogs, create blog properties as part of their holdings, or transform their content channels into blogs.  In nearly every case that I’ve seen this happen not one company has been able to knock it out of the park.  In many cases [...]

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What I Learned about Raising Capital from Ron Conway

Not long ago we posted about a private event in the Valley that we were able to giveaway spaces to a few of you about raising capital. The panel was moderated by Jay Ward and featured Ron Conway, MC Hammer and Brian Patterson. Five slots were held for Black Web 2.0 readers and we gave four away. Wesley Michel was one of the four. He is working on launching a real-time app for local markets. Here is his first person account of the event:

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BET.com ditches BET On Blast, Takes note from Hulu

Though the BET On Blast video player was nice when it launched a little over 2 years ago video on the web has certainly moved in another direction.  Specifically if you happen to be a television network.  BET.com recently ditched the BET on Blast player, which many thought was hard to navigate, and leveled the [...]

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Danyel Smith Steps Down as Executive Editor of TheRoot

The Maynard Institute reported yesterday that the Executive Editor Danyel Smith has stepped down from her post at TheRoot.com after 6 short weeks.  It’s being reported that the decision was made largely because of her commute between New York and Washington DC where TheRoot’s operations are based.  TheRoot’s publisher Donna Byrd gave this statement: “We are [...]

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Global Grind Acquires CelebrityTweet.com

Russell Simmons @UncleRush announced via Twitter today that Global Grind had acquired celebrity twitter aggregation site CelebrityTweet.com.  We’ve contacted them the get terms of the deal and will update if we hear back.  He mentioned on Twitter that he thinks the site’s integration into Global Grind will help the property continue to grow. Developing…

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#BeatCancer Breaks Twitter Trends and Sets Guinness World Record

EVERYWHERE, a Social Media Marketing and Content Development firm based in Atlanta, GA set a record October 16-17th for the most widespread social network message in 24 hours. According to Radian6, the official online monitoring company, the phrase #BeatCancer set the record with 209,771 mentions on Twitter, Facebook and blog posts. This translates into an [...]

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BlackAtlas.com Launched Today…Syke.

Not sure if you missed yesterdays coverage (late coverage) of the BlackAtlas.com preview, it included video and a nice overview of what the value proposition of Black Atlas would be.  I was really interested in seeing what the site would look like and the different functionality it would have and to be honest, if I [...]

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American Airlines and Burrell Launch BlackAtlas.com

American Airlines developed BlackAtlas.com in partnership with Burrell Communications and Juxt Interactive and is a “social networking” site that will allow travelers to share travel experiences that may be unique to African-Americans with each other and the community there.  The site’s content will be user generated for the most part however Nelson George will serve [...]

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Bob Johnson to Launch Charity Auction Site ClubCharity.com

Bob Johnson’s interest in internet businesses continues to grow.  While things have been quite regarding his interest in what was said to be a video destination for content producers called Point of You (see our past coverage on this topic) we learned this morning that he will be launching another site.  This one with less [...]

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