Citing a shortage of reliable news sources for African American students in mainstream media, a new collaborative venture between U-Wire and The Black World Today will provide daily coverage on the Web of race issues and other news of interest to minority students, culled from 140 college newspapers across the United States.
Campus Beat will supplement The Black World Today's international news coverage with 10 to 15 stories a day provided by U-Wire, a news service for college journalists launched in 1994 by Michael Lazerow, then a sophomore at Northwestern University. Black World Today publisher Don Rojas hopes the new service will "help students on campuses - white and black - play a pivotal role in dialogs about race," especially in light of President Clinton's recent statements about the danger of racial conflicts becoming a "festering sore" in contemporary society.
"It's time to put some teeth into that rhetoric," Rojas says, adding that "there is no other national news resource - in print or online - that can provide this kind of information on a daily basis."
Reporters from the Harvard Crimson, the Michigan Daily, the Yale Daily News, UCLA's Daily Bruin, and many other college publications feed stories to the papers subscribing to U-Wire, which reaches a combined readership of 800,000 students, faculty members, and administrators.
Penny Francis, spokeswoman for Black Collegian magazine, agrees with Rojas' assessment that minority students' concerns are virtually ignored by mainstream news outlets. "There's definitely a shortage.... [Minority students] have a hard time locating good news sources. Even on the Net, they have to search through a million links on search engines" to find relevant information, she says, pointing out that the news section of Black Collegian Online is one of the site's most heavily trafficked areas.
The new venture was conceived in an exchange of email between Rojas and Lazerow, who is white, says Rojas. Calling the new service a "cross-race collaboration," Rojas hopes that Campus Beat will expose white readers of The Black World Today - an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of his site's readership - to the "richness of culture" being created by minority students on campuses worldwide.
"We hope that new media will generate these kinds of collaborations," Rojas says.
