By Aria Bell
Blavity
Reprinted – by Texas Metro News
In the last 35 years, how people consume news has drastically changed as technology has evolved.
Due to the ever-changing multimedia landscape, the 2024 AFROTECH Conference discussed the current climate of Black media.
During the conference, Morgan DeBaun, Blavity’s founder and CEO, moderated a forum with Alfred Liggins, CEO of Radio One, who was transparent about navigating the constant transitions of the media industry. As technology continues advancing, publications must keep up with the trends and how consumers choose to digest important content.
Radio One is a Black-founded and family-owned business launched in 1981. It has secured generational wealth for Liggins’ family (he’s the son of Radio One founder Cathy Hughes), and he gave insight into how they’ve stayed at the forefront for decades. To explain how the media conglomerate’s infrastructure was built, he revealed his approach to elevating his digital media brand.
“In order to grow it [a company], you actually have to be successful, meaning you ultimately have to make money. Or if you’re not making money, you sell it to somebody who hopes that they can make it better,” Liggins told attendees. “In our case, we ultimately had to be profitable. So we very much approached our business not as if we were going to sell it to somebody else, but it needed to be a profit generator.”
“A classic example is we own radio stations, a bunch of ’em, but we didn’t know anything about television. We went to Comcast, who was our original partner,” he added.
Additionally, innovative partnerships played a crucial role in Radio One’s ability to sustain its longevity.
“I also saw early on with a lot of older black businesses, they were afraid to bring in partners and capital,” he said. “People own businesses and they own assets, it’s really like a lifestyle thing. This is my world. I control it. But you need money to grow businesses, right? You need expertise to grow businesses. When I hired that gentleman from Discovery, Jonathan Rogers, I gave him a piece of TV One. II gave him equity in order…he came for the mission, but was also accompanied with an economic opportunity and families.”
Another major part of the expansion was talent acquisition.
“You need people. You have to import the best talent that doesn’t currently work into your company to help you grow that company, particularly because you are a family-owned business,” Liggins stated. “And quite frankly, what I did is I searched for African Americans that worked at mainstream companies that we’re already running radio stations or cable television networks and said, ‘Hey, come help me do this for our people.’”
This led to the importance of not being ashamed of standing behind the target audience the entity chooses to serve because that does add purpose and value to an organization.
“I grew up as a salesman. That’s my skill set, if you will. It’s good to have a position, like ‘This is who I am. This is what we stand for. This is who we serve. And the reason you should do business with me is because I’m specialized. I have a niche and I super-serve this [community],’” he said.
Something noticeable that has transpired recently, following the impact of George Floyd’s death, was the realization that Black consumers matter and provide exceptional value to markets. Despite this, there’s still work to be done.
“Then you have the George Floyd tragedy. It’s unfortunate, but it did open a lot of doors for advertisers to say, ‘OK, I get it. I need to make sure that we spend against this demographic.’ That is receding as you just said,” Liggins relayed to DeBaun. “So, you saw an explosion of Black media content that was being created. You saw ad dollars follow that and that is starting to roll back on all levels, both the content creation level and the ad dollar dollars level. So that’s gonna be the biggest challenge going forward.”
He stressed how collaborations will be the leading factor in media companies staying afloat given the state of media.
“I suspect that you’ll see people having to get together in order to get larger and defined efficiencies in order to make money and to ultimately survive, but that’s also happening in the entire media ecosystem,” Liggins said.
