S. Mitra Kalita Knows ‘There Is No White Knight Coming to Save Us’
Five years into supporting outlets that serve communities of color, the cofounder of URL Media talks about the relationship between capitalism and democracy and how nonprofit publishers can operate from a position of power.
S. Mitra Kalita was a senior vice president at CNN when she left, in late 2020, to pursue her own journalism venture. The financial leap was scary, she says, but her idealism outweighed her fear. “When we lose belief in idealism, we really lose the basic tenets of what drives journalism and what drives democracy,” Kalita told me.
Her startup, URL Media, which she cofounded with WURD Radio CEO Sara Lomax-Reese, is a multiplatform network that shares revenue, distribution, content, and other resources among news outlets that primarily serve communities of color. “The media that is most trusted and squarely has a sense of who it’s for is often the least resourced,” Kalita said. That’s the problem URL Media seeks to address.
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The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.
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As newsrooms struggle with rickety business models and precarious finances — as well as new technologies — they are deploying an array of editorial responses.
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