- Sterling K. Brown makes history again. At this year’s SAG Award, Brown became the first Black actor to win ‘Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series.’
- Ciara gets blasted for a video she posted on Instagram about marriage. With the caption “#Levelup. Don’t Settle,” The video spoke to women who want to be married but “walking in the spirit of a girlfriend.” People were offended that she might have been connecting self-worth to being married.
- Rapper Fredo Santana, the cousin of rapper Chief Keef, died from a seizure. He passed away at the young age of 27. According to TMZ, he was recently hospitalized for liver and kidney failure.
- Cardi B defends her fiance Offset for the alleged homophobic lyric, “I cannot vibe with queers”. Cardi B says her fiancé treats everyone with the same amount of respect.
- The Senate will vote at noon Monday, Jan. 22 on a bill to reopen the government. It’s still unclear if this vote will win over Democrats.
Still independent.
We hope this story was worth your time. For over 14 years, Atlanta Black Star has stayed Black-owned and independently run. We didn't get here by waiting on ad budgets that were never built to prioritize us. Our readers did that.
Corporate support for Black media has always been thin. Outlets like ours get roughly 1% of the $170 billion spent on U.S. advertising each year, and that margin is shrinking further as advertisers walk back the DEI-linked commitments they made in 2020. That's the backdrop. It's not why we're asking.
The wider picture isn't any steadier. Newspaper ad revenue has fallen more than 80% since 2005, and local newsrooms are closing at a rate of roughly two a week nationwide. When outlets go under, it's rarely the ones built to center a Black perspective from the ground up that get to stick around.
We know a request for support isn't why you came here. But without readers choosing to fund this work directly, the depth of reporting we can do at home and abroad shrinks along with everyone else's. If you're not in a position to give, that doesn't change how much we value you as a reader.
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