By SIERRA JIMINEZ
The UNITY News

It all began in 1999 with a few e-mails and the determination to educate African-Americans on critical news issues.

As a Net-roots activist and social entrepreneur, Chris Rabb started his career by simply aggregating content online that dealt with African-Americans from mainstream and independent news sources. Within the first 18 months of e-mailing news to subscribers, his list of recipients soared to 10,000 people.

Today, Rabb expresses his voice through his Web site, Afro-Netizen, where he posts weekly blogs on issues that concern African-Americans and other people of color. He is a member of a small population of bloggers of color. Specifically, Rabb is a part of the Afrosphere, a blogosphere that pertains to the African-American community.

In 2006, Antoinette Pole, an assistant professor of political science at Montclair State University in New Jersey, conducted a study with colleague Laura McKenna. Their research reported “less than 12 percent of bloggers are black, Hispanic, and Asian –compared to 30 percent of the U.S. population.”

Not only do bloggers of color make up a small part of the blogosphere, they seem to play a less prominent role in the category of elite or “A-List” bloggers. Last year, The Washington Post reported that the blogosphere lacked diversity.

A panel workshop hosted by Time Inc. will address the importance for journalists of color to embrace blogging.

“Get Your Blog On,” 11 a.m. Friday in McCormick Place West, Room W192, will feature panelists including Sree Sreenivasan, co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association, and Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Inc. The panelists will also provide information on ways to determine your blogging style – opinion, news or both.

“Getting to that point where one is considered an elite blogger is very challenging to begin with, and we have very few minority bloggers,” Pole said.

Often, the number of hits a blog gets in a day plays a big role in its popularity.

“People are interested in talking with bloggers that have popular Web sites,” Rabb said. “If you choose to talk about issues of race, or disparity or inequality, that’s not going to appeal to a general market.”
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute, said, “Even the Internet tilts towards a mass audience, and in America, mass audience defaults to white.”

Race, ethnicity, politics and campaigns are popular topics that bloggers focus on. In her study of minority bloggers, Pole found that although bloggers of color don’t always focus primarily on issues of race and ethnicity, it’s not uncommon for much of the commentary in their blogs to deal with how general issues affect minorities.

“A well-focused blog has a very particular niche,” said Kim Pearson, an associate professor of English at the College of New Jersey.

So what can minorities do to get a bigger chunk of the blogosphere? One option experts suggest is to appeal to the masses.

Although the number of daily hits a blog receives may be the way to determine an elite blogger, it does not necessarily determine whether a blog is successful or effective.

“For me, it’s not so much the number of people who read it – it’s who’s reading it,” Pearson said.

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