Q&A: Andrew Ramsammy on building sustainability for Black publishers with collaboration

Andrew Ramsammy is the chief impact officer for the Local Media Association (LMA) and Local Media Foundation (LMF), which work with local news publishers by guiding collaboratives and offering resources.

One of Ramsammy’s main projects is Word in Black, a collaborative made up of 10 Black publishers that share a strong and historic legacy. We caught up with Ramsammy to hear about how LMA is helping to create sustainable business models and forge a successful framework for others.

WF: How did you get involved in journalism?

AR: I got into journalism because I wanted to be an actor. I went to the High School of Performing Arts in New York and I had a teacher who noticed I liked to tell stories and direct others, and suggested that I get behind the scenes and behind the camera. I learned about the AV club at our high school and started filming all our events. I did production and documentary films in high school, and that’s how I got into journalism and storytelling. Storytelling has been at the center of my career, and both journalism and acting are offshoots of that.

I’ve always been interested in the business side of the work that we do. While journalism and storytelling is important to me, the business component is equally as important. Audience engagement, sponsorship, underwriting, sales — I’ve always been interested in the back end of the business and how it actually runs. Having come from the storytelling side, I can see both perspectives and I want both to thrive. For me, it’s about how we can close the gap between what journalists and storytellers are trying to achieve, while recognizing that we are a business, and there is some financial engine that makes this all go. How do those two worlds intersect and align to be able to deliver on journalism’s mission and purpose?

WF: What made you want to work at the Local Media Association?

AR: I love that LMA is so committed to focusing on business transformation. That’s always been part of the work I’ve done. How do we make our work sustainable for years to come? Nancy Lane told me about Word in Black and these 10 Black publishers coming together, recognizing their value and legacy, and wanting to accelerate their own digital transformation. This was in the middle of the pandemic, and this information was vitally necessary to communities that were being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. How could you say no?

WF: How did Word in Black come together as a collaborative?

AR: I think the publishers recognized the moment after George Floyd that they really needed to come together to collaborate on a seminal moment that had occurred. These 10 Black publishers could have an impact and a change on the way people view inequities in America. For local publishers like those in Word in Black, these are stories that happen every day in their communities. But when these stories go national, these publishers often lose equity in that conversation. There was an opportunity to maintain equity in that conversation — to not only highlight the challenges and issues around how Black people and communities of color are treated around policing — but also all the inequities that disproportionately affect Black communities like education, health, finance, and climate.

These publishers could also elevate what people in these communities are doing to find solutions. Our publishers wanted to ensure that the work they’ve been doing at the local level would be able to continue to resonate at a national level. There’s a unity of purpose when you have 10 like-minded publishers, many of them with decades of publishing experience. Some of them are going on second-generation, some are going on fifth-generation. They were all familiar with their work and knew each other, either growing up as kids or in this industry together. To have that unity of mission and purpose from the onset made running the collaborative a lot easier. Not to say everything is always rosy, but it makes some of the hard stuff easier.

WF: How do you go about advising these publishers on digital transformation and a path to business sustainability?

AR: With Word in Black, the Knight x LMA BloomLab is focused on sustainability for Black publishers and we look specifically at digital transformation. That is at the core of what needs to drive change — recognizing how audiences are changing the way they consume content. But there’s also the print product, which still for all of our publishers is the dominant source of revenue. We can’t take away the importance of what it means to those communities. Especially during COVID, it was a vital source of information. How do we transform both digital and print?

From the LMA side, we’re supporting that with audience engagement strategies, revenue opportunities like Google Ads Manager, national or local buying opportunities to collaborate on together — and then the technology and strategy that drives all that. We want to ensure that for each of these publishers, if Word in Black or the BloomLab went away tomorrow, they would still be able to do this work on their own. We want to provide these tools and resources for long-term sustainability so that these publishers can continue to maintain their own independence. That’s our goal: free and independent publishers for generations to come.

WF: How do you strike that balance between print and digital for the legacy Black publishers?

AR: You have to understand that the print product for Black publishers was born out of the church. The reason why the Black press existed was that the printing press physically was inside church buildings and it was a literal gathering point where communities could get information. We have to recognize the value of what that means to Black communities in particular.

Between the 10 Word in Black publishers, they have a combined history of 800+ years. I consider it as we’re working with the world’s oldest Black media startup. Yes, audiences are consuming content in different ways and there are many platforms out there. But at the heart of what this product does, it represents itself and its needs better than any other community, because it has to. It understands its audiences better than anyone else. Here in 2023, you turn on any news or TV show, and everyone is trying to engage Black audiences and communities. So why not partner with the Black press?

The Black press will fight until the very end to make sure that they exist despite the economic headwinds and rapid digital transformation. They will always go back to the core of why they exist — they have not seen themselves accurately and fairly represented to their audiences. I believe that after George Floyd, many Americans have questioned their own consumption of media and have begun to diversify their own media habits and anecdotally, I would say more people are consuming Black media and Black content from Black sources and Black publishers, as opposed to mainstream media.

WF: Where do you see Word in Black going from here?

AR: There are many more publishers that deserve the funding and resources beyond the 10 in Word in Black. It’s absolutely necessary that we have multiple players in this ecosystem. Capital B, The Triibe, everyone that is trying to do this work — it’s refreshing to see so many new players coming into the space. But I also hear from them directly about the challenges and issues they face. The antidote is collaboration. Word in Black is about building a model for sustainability — how does this grow beyond the 10 publishers? They will become owners in this business. It’s answering multiple questions that people ask. How do you create equity? How do you create opportunities for voices that go unheard? We’re trying to do as many things as possible with what we have to show that there’s a lot more in this model that we’re providing and can share with everyone.

Our latest LGBTQ+ collaborative is also following in these footsteps. It would be foolish of us to just focus on one audience and that’s it. We certainly think there is a lot to be learned from this model. It is nuanced and based on each audience, so it’s not one size fits all, but at least in terms of the playbook, and how we’ve been able to develop the strategy and build it as we go along, certainly we think there are scalable opportunities. The most important asset that each one of these publishers brings to the table is trust. They have a strong connection to the community — and that can’t be built overnight.

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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with operational and project funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, NJ Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and the Independence Public Media Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.