Colorlines: Media for Everyone

The mainstream media has portrayed a male dominated, straight, white-centric perspective for ages. For marginalized communities, the mainstream media often misrepresents them on the news, and they regularly don't cover issues affecting these communities in their broadcast. These two factors are just a couple that make people of color distrust the media.

This is where local, independent journalism thrives. Independent media talk about issues in these marginalized communities, and sheds light on the injustice they face. One publication in particular is Colorlines.

Colorlines, according to their website, is a daily news site focusing on racial injustice. To them, "race matters," and the site features in-depth reporting, news analysis, opinion and curation. When first looking at the site, I notice there is a lot of race-based content. This ranges from criminalization, to arts and culture, to islamophobia, to gender and sexuality, and more. Also, the contributors of the online publication are all writers of color, which is something you don't normally see in most newsrooms. This is an aspect I found most satisfying, and I believe this has created a greater trust with this publication amongst communities of color.

As I went more in-depth with the publication, there were many articles that stuck out to me. One was under the Islamophobia tab, an article entitled "The Dos and Dont's of Talking to Kids of Color About White Supremacy." The headline of the article itself is very powerful and attention grabbing. The article also connects to a large audience because in the social and political climate we currently live in, this is definitely a conversation parents of color unfortunately have to be having with their children, especially since the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The mainstream media is not talking about how to parent in the Trump Era, and that's mostly because most of those who produce the news and who are the audience have the privilege to not have to do so. Also the writer of the article mentioned the mainstream media's relationship with people of color and how it creates an internalized bias:

"Media and society convey relentless negative messages about people of color and others who are pushed to the margins of society."

Besides articles themselves, I was also impressed by the arts and culture section of the publication. Instead of only focusing on racial injustice and other systematic/institutional forms of oppression, this section sheds light of accomplishments of people of color. Readers can learn about black artists latest projects to bios of more local, unknown creators. This is the side of media we never see on the mainstream. The mainstream news decides what they believe is actual news, which is normally give Donald Trump more screen time. Colorlines succeeds in showing the other news: the positive stories. This is something I wish we would see more of in other publications.