women who start things
sara and mitra

Where the idea came from

S. Mitra Kalita: Sara and I met in 2018, when I was at CNN and she was at WURD, Philadelphia’s Black talk radio station. We both were selected for a program at Harvard called the Media Transformation Challenge. Fast-forward to spring of 2020, which of course is the pandemic, and then George Floyd was murdered in May. Within days of that, we were on the phone, asking each other, “What could we do?”

Sara M. Lomax: My entire career was in Black media—entrepreneurial, community-based, smaller, hyper-local. So I’ve always been acutely aware of the challenges that plague independent media in general. That was the first time in my entire career that I witnessed corporations and philanthropies and media—all these big institutions—saying, "Oh, wow; we need to do something.”

The goal

Lomax: We quickly came to the fact that there are so many Black and Brown media organizations that have been doing excellent work for decades—without recognition, without resources, without support. Instead of creating a new digital magazine, we decided to launch a network of high-performing Black and brown media organizations that amplify each other’s content and share revenues as a way to build greater sustainability for BIPOC media. That was our charge.

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First steps

Kalita: We started with eight media partners and met with newsrooms to say, “Hey, we have this network; do you want to run our content?” They’d say, “Of course; we need diverse content, but we do not even have diverse staff right now.” So we said, “We can help you with that.” We devised a recruitment business.

Lomax: It was an unintended offshoot, which has become really central to our business model.

The hardest moment

Lomax: One of the key parts of the business model is garnering advertising revenue to share with our partners to build greater sustainability for BIPOC media. We planted lots of seeds with advertisers from the time we launched in 2021, but we didn’t start to see the fruits of our labor until late in the third quarter of 2022. That’s a long time to be in a holding pattern, but our advertising growth has exceeded our original expectations.

The moment you thought it might just work

Kalita: We work with a lot of media organizations who say, “I really like the way you all work.” Well, there’s more where that came from. They’ll call us when Haiti’s president is assassinated—we can get the Haitian Times on a lot of mainstream media right away.

Lomax: As a start-up, you need people who will step out on faith with you to build something that doesn't currently exist. Our ability to recruit and retain people who have worked at large media outlets has been a big part of what is making this work.

The results

Lomax: We’ve grown our collective audience to nearly 12 million through our 20 BIPOC media partners.

Kalita: In year one, we were profitable. In year two, we doubled revenues.

Learn more about URL Media’s mission here.