Black News Channel

» see blacknewschannel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Black News Channel went on the air on 10 February 2020 from a studio in Tallahassee, Florida. Bob Brillante had been trying to get it financed for years, and the former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts came on as chairman and as the public face of it. The pitch was a 24-hour cable news network reported and staffed for Black American audiences, on the basic tier, nationally, which nobody had put there before.

The money was Shahid Khan, who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars. By March 2021 the channel was available in 52 million American homes, and that number is worth sitting with: a startup network normally spends a decade failing to get carriage like that. The audience never arrived with it. Across 2021 its programs averaged about 4,000 viewers, which put it 123rd out of the 124 cable networks Nielsen was measuring.

In July 2020 the former CNN executive Princell Hair came in as president and chief executive, and the channel rebuilt itself around a talk schedule and a morning show. The relaunch hired roughly 250 journalists and production staff. That is a real newsroom by any measure, and it was operating on an audience of four thousand.

On Friday 25 March 2022 Hair told the staff the network was ceasing live production and would file for bankruptcy. The official line was that "due to challenging market conditions and global financial pressures, we have been unable to meet our financial goals, and the timeline afforded to us has run out." The version the newsroom got was more specific. The company was three weeks short of payroll and the paychecks due that day never landed. Khan had decided to stop putting money in. Live programming ended at five o'clock that afternoon.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the week it worked ~

The Senate Judiciary Committee spent 21 to 24 March 2022 questioning Ketanji Brown Jackson, and BNC covered the hearings live with its own anchors and its own Washington bureau. It was the biggest audience the channel ever had. A Black news network covering the confirmation of the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court is the entire editorial argument the thing was built on, and for four days that argument was on television and people were watching it. The channel went dark the following afternoon.

Only one route could have carried any of this to Ankara. BNC streamed free on Pluto and on Tubi alongside the cable feed, and it sat on the Roku Channel as well. Not one of those apps operated in Turkey in 2022. So a network with distribution into 52 million households had, for most of the world, no route at all, and by the time it finally had something an audience wanted, it had two days left to run it.

~ what it cost ~

Khan's total outlay was never published as a single number. What is documented is the shape of the failure. Fifty-two million homes and roughly four thousand viewers, against a payroll the company could not cover on a Friday in March. Distribution was never the thing that killed it. The usual cable news death runs the other way around, with an audience in place and nobody willing to carry the signal.

~ what happened to the signal ~

Chapter 11 came on 28 March, three days after the lights went out. Byron Allen's Allen Media Group bought the assets for 11 million dollars, and what it was buying was the carriage: the channel positions on Comcast and Charter systems that BNC had spent two years securing. From 1 August 2022 those slots carried TheGrio TV. In December the case converted to Chapter 7, the liquidation chapter, and the company stopped existing in any form.

The staff were still owed money. Florida reporting in the week after the shutdown found the company could not pay people for hours they had already worked, and there was no severance for anybody. The National Association of Black Journalists spent that spring trying to place 230 people at once. The last thing the channel did was its best week.

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