A nonprofit news project covering race, social justice and related issues took another step toward becoming a reality on Thursday.
Yawu Miller, formerly the senior editor of The Bay State Banner, announced on Twitter that the nascent organization he’s launching with Claudio Martinez will be called the Greater Boston News Bureau “with the aim of supporting local news outlets that serve communities of color in and around Boston.” Martinez is the executive director of La Vida Scholars, “a community based organization that equips low-income, high-achieving Lynn students with the resources and preparation needed to enter great colleges.”
Miller has continued reporting for the Banner, which covers the Black community in Greater Boston, after his uncle Melvin Miller sold it to a local group a little less than a year ago. That arrangement will remain in place, Yawu Miller wrote, saying that his work “will continue to appear in the Banner as well as other news outlets and will now be credited to the Greater Boston News Bureau. All our articles will be free for other publications to re-publish and will be available in Spanish as well as English.”
The official launch, he added, will come later this year.
Miller and Martinez comprise one of four teams that were awarded grants by the American Journalism Project last year as part of its local news incubator program. Each team was awarded a $400,000 grant. The other teams are based in Miami, Phoenix and Oregon. The Phoenix project is aimed at serving that area’s LGBTQ community. According to the AJP’s announcement from last July:
The local news incubator, launched by the American Journalism Project, with support from the Google News Initiative, aims to lower barriers to entry for prospective founders of local news organizations and diversify the field. By providing robust funding and council, this kind of program allows local news talent to go all-in on their ideas and draw on lessons learned from other nonprofit local news organizations across the country, with the runway that will provide them financial security to take an entrepreneur’s leap.
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I hope they will not be using Twitter, as they did with the announcement.
Always been a fan but in both his twitter feed and his reporting Yawu has seemingly shifted into activist journalism mode over the past few years (apologies if i had misread him prior). His biases are harmful to his reporting quality.
Honestly, at this point in the media world, I would rather see good and thoughtful advocacy journalism than crappy “regular” journalism. I’ve very loosely followed Yawu, and what I’ve seen always looked solid.