Fighting for media equity when DEI is vilified

Everything and everyone has a story. But not all of them are true.

I still remember my first undergraduate journalism class when I heard the famous phrase “he who controls the media, controls the mind.” Ever since, I have stayed acutely aware not only of the narratives directed at me, but also of those I tell myself about who I am.

I started my career at the epicenter of the greatest storytelling genre of all time; Hip Hop. First as an assistant at Def Jam Records, then into management at Universal Music Group and Atlantic Records. A scrawny kid from Long Island with deep roots in Queens, where I was born, I realized I was standing on the side of the industry that kept telling the story wrong. The lyrics called for community infrastructure, better schools, and economic justice. We were selling the opposite, packaged in staged photoshoots and videos.

A young person who never sees himself represented with dignity learns to price himself accordingly. That is the machinery of a culture quietly deciding who counts, and I have watched it up close. That instinct never left me, and it surfaced again in the spring of 2020, watching an industry perform enlightenment with its eyes closed.

What started as a simple text to a few friends, “do you see what’s happening? We need to do something. These black squares are stupid!” turned into the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute (BOMESI). The first person to raise their hand was Rhonesha Byng, founder of Her Agenda, and now cofounder of BOMESI Foundation serving as its Chief Mission Officer.

By the summer of 2020, we were done watching a market be mistaken for a favor. Diverse publishers were stronger as one voice than as hundreds fighting alone for scraps. One of our first projects was a verified directory of Black-owned publishers: 50 names then, nearly 400 now, including Blavity, The Root, and Her Agenda.

Here is the math we couldn’t unsee. There is a multicultural consumer market in this country worth trillions, and Black-owned media receives roughly two percent of total advertising spend, about the same share it held decades ago, despite everything that has supposedly changed. Diverse-owned publishers who spent generations earning the trust of their audiences watch the dollars that trust generates flow somewhere else. In any other category, a gap that wide between market size and investment would be called an arbitrage opportunity, and capital would rush to close it. Because this one wears the label “diversity,” the industry treats it as a liability to manage instead of what it is: the most underpriced audience relationship in American media.

We built BOMESI to correct that error at the root. Reaching the fastest-growing audiences in America is not a favor; it is a distribution strategy. Buying media from the outlets those audiences trust is marketing, the plain arithmetic of reach, resonance, and return. For too long, that work lived on a special budget, reported to a special officer, insulated from the core business, so it could be deleted the moment the political weather turned.

In the aftermath of 2020, it was. I watched the pledges arrive with fanfare and leave through the service entrance, and sympathy dollars dry up the instant sympathy became inconvenient. Sympathy carries no contract and no renewal clause, a poor foundation for anything durable.

BOMESI stands on sturdier ground. We unite more than 300 Black-owned and 2,200 diverse-owned publishers into a powerhouse network reaching roughly 100 million households a month, and put that scale to work three ways. We build the ecosystem: shared ad technology, collective sales, first-party data no platform can take away. We provide the education and resources publishers need to scale their businesses and stand their ground. And we drive economic empowerment by moving real advertising dollars to the outlets that earn them; through deals, not penance. Penance expires; contracts renew.

Let me be precise: BOMESI operates as an advocacy and strategic-resource organization, and I correct anyone who reaches for the word charity, because it misreads the enterprise. The systemic underinvestment that made this organization necessary is real, and we name it plainly rather than soften it.

The wins belong to the publishers’ own resilience; the coalition supports that resilience rather than taking credit for it. The humanity of these communities does not depend on a business case, though the business case has always held up on its own terms. The moral argument was sufficient long before I learned to lead with the economic one. The moral case tells you what is right; it has never once told a CFO what is durable.

BOMESI was created because the moral case and the economic case point in the same direction, and the only thing standing between a company and acting on both is some nerve. The audiences are still here. The publishers are still building. The trillions in spending power never moved. What went missing was the industry’s courage to act on what it already knew. BOMESI exists to make that courage structural, to build infrastructure that outlasts any single news cycle and keeps diverse-owned media telling its own stories, in its own voice, for the decade ahead.

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This article represents the opinions of its writer.

DéVon Christopher Johnson is a media entrepreneur and a marketing expert with over 19 years of experience in creating and leading diverse and inclusive multimedia platforms. He is the Founder and CEO of BOMESI, a non-profit organization that supports and empowers underrepresented media outlets to thrive and grow. He is also the founder and CEO of BleuLife Media Group, a full-scale media company that speaks to the modern and aspirational multicultural male audience through print, digital, podcasts, events, and influencers.