Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, TechCrunch media and advertising reporter Anthony Ha sat down with Blavity CEO Morgan DeBaun and The Shade Room CEO Angelica Nwandu to chat about their respective media companies, 2020 in the media world and how they view a recent conversation inside of media to hire and retain more diverse workforces.
Blavity is a network of online publications focused on Black audiences across verticals like politics, travel and technology. To date, the company has raised $9.4 million, according to Crunchbase data.
The Shade Room is an Instagram-focused media company that publishes hourly updates on national news, celebrity updates and fashion. Focused on the Black perspective, The Shade Room has attracted more than 20 million followers on Instagram and comments on issues of importance during key national moments.
During her conversation with Ha, Nwandu said that during the Black Lives Matters protests, The Shade Room was akin to a Black CNN.
With both companies founded in 2014, both CEOs have kept their media startups alive during a particularly difficult period. In the last six years, many media brands have shuttered, sold, slimmed or slunk away to the ash heap of history.
The carnage in the national media landscape seemed to quicken as COVID-19 disrupted the national economy and reduced some advertising spend. As a result, more media layoffs landed in the industry during a news-heavy time. But while many companies suffered, DeBaun and Nwandu said they found a way forward.
According to Nwandu, her firm benefited from a rise in time spent online by her audience. “Everyone’s at home,” she said, and because “everybody’s on the internet,” it’s led to more engagement. Because The Shade Room’s audience was so tuned in, the firm “grew faster this year” than before, according to the CEO.
Not that 2020 didn’t bring some disruption: Nwandu noted that her firm “switched out the kind of advertisers” that it had hosted previously, including a switch toward more ads from companies helping people become increasingly self-reliant. She also said that individuals wanting to support Black companies provided a tailwind to her business.
Blavity also had good news to report, with DeBaun saying during the same conversation that her “media business has been up significantly,” even growing “faster than it did last year.” The Blavity founder said that her “display advertising branded digital is up this year, despite COVID.” How? DeBaun credited the strong results to the “strength of the [Blavity] brands and the fact that we have a diversity of lifestyle brands in addition to the news brand.”
At least some media companies are going to make it through 2020 whole.
The two also talked about hiring diverse staffs, something media companies are notoriously poor at, and their plans for the future. DeBaun even broke some news, announcing that Blavity will work with Latinx millennial media company Remezcla on a project that is focused on an Afro-Latinx brand, coming out some time next year.
Hit play for a look inside an evolving media world from two of its brightest change agents.