Covering a Divided Nation: Highlights from the Institute and URL Media’s summit on Black and Brown media

On Wednesday, Jan. 15, the National Press Club Journalism Institute partnered with URL Media to produce a summit focused on lessons learned from Black and Brown media organizations’ coverage of the 2024 presidential election. The event was held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and live-streamed on SPILL and YouTube.

During the half-day event, which coincided with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, panelists discussed the significance and urgency of centering the voices of Black women; the opportunity before the media in 2025; and what’s needed to commit journalism within a second Trump administration. Attendees ended the day by setting intentions for how to make the journalism industry stronger through collaboration and resource-building.

Here are some key moments from each session:

Listen to Black Women

“It’s incumbent upon us to go where our audiences are and be on Instagram,” Cierra Hinton, former executive director of Scalawag and co-founder of the Lorde Society, said in a panel on listening to and engaging Black women. “I don’t mean, post your latest story with a little picture. That is not being on Instagram. That does not drive engagement. Your audiences are not going to build affinity for you. They’re not going to become loyal supporters that then follow you off-platform, which is what you need to get them to do … It’s really thinking about audiences, and therefore, thinking about people.”

This conversation featured:

Cierra Hinton, former executive director of Scalawag Magazine and co-founder of The Lorde Society
Jonquilyn Hill, host of “Explain it to Me,” Vox Media; Lauren Willams, CEO & co-founder of Capital B News
Moderated by: Sara Lomax, co-founder and president of URL Media and president and CEO of WURD Radio

The Opportunity Before Media Now

URL Media co-founder and CEO S. Mitra Kalita spoke about the “Opportunity Before Media Now” with host and journalist Don Lemon and Kenya Parham, the global vice president of community and partnerships at SPILL, a Black-owned social media platform that launched in 2023 as an alternative to Twitter (now X).

Lemon spoke about his departure from CNN and how he’s cultivated a more engaged audience through live-streaming with fewer restrictions on what he can and can’t say:

“Every day, I get, ‘I love the new version of Don Lemon. You’re free now.’ It’s just really weird. I was like, ‘Well who was I before, guys?’ ” Lemon said of launching The Don Lemon Show, which first live-streamed last spring. “They just didn’t relate because I wasn’t as relatable. I was always authentic, but there were certain things you couldn’t do, you couldn’t say. You represented an institution … three big letters … now it is just me, and it’s like, here’s who I am.”

The conversation covered how nontraditional platforms provide an opportunity to reach people without a filter. Lemon continued: “This is my conversation that I’m having with my community, my folks. So I feel freer to be more honest.”

This conversation featured:

Don Lemon, host of The Don Lemon Show
Kenya Parham, global vice president of community and partnerships at SPILL
Moderated by: S. Mitra Kalita, CEO and co-founder of URL Media

Voting Patterns Across Communities

Journalists and independent media leaders shared how they covered their communities’ voting patterns in 2024 and the challenges in getting voter realities out to a broader audience.

“There are some issues that I think affect all of us, but we are so busy trying to separate ourselves from each other that it becomes easier for other people to separate us,” said

Solomon Jones, a host on WURD Radio and a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, speaking of issues that could unite people from different backgrounds.

Neely Bardwell, a freelance reporter for Native News Online, described how traditional polling methods failed to accurately capture voting patterns across indigenous communities and how exit polls from the 2024 election were misleading. The data came from respondents who self-identified as Native American, which presents questions about accuracy, and none of the exit poll locations were on tribal land, according to the Indigenous Journalist Association.

“I want to make sure that we’re all on level footing here, so we’re not going, ‘Oh my gosh, all the Indians voted for Trump,’ when that’s just not true,” Bardwell said. “But unfortunately that is the narrative that mainstream media decided to stick with. So I wrote the story challenging that, and that was something I did all election season — challenging the major narratives on both the Democrat and Republican side.”

Several panelists highlighted the need — now, more than ever — to confidently call out misinformation, even though doing so may present new challenges.

“With Facebook basically disavowing themselves from having to correct anybody and leaving everyone up to self-moderation, it really puts a lot more pressure on us as media to try to call this stuff out,” said Randall Yip, founder of AsAmNews.

Panelists included: