Writing with a distinct voice that allows her personality to shine through, Belton rarely leaves the readers wondering what she's really thinking.

"Big Sis sent me this story Friday and my head almost exploded from the sheer ignorance of it," she wrote about on the Louisiana judge who refused to marry an interracial couple.

Belton is equally up-front about her personal life, recounting her failed marriage, her forays into fashion and on being bipolar. Here is the former print reporter in her own words.

How would you describe your blog and when did it start?

The blog started in August of 2007, but then it was just a personal blog and not what it is today. I would describe what it is now as a political, pop cultural blog with a satirical tilt. It can be serious, but most of the time I like to poke fun at the day's news and find a lighter way of dealing with heavy issues.

Can you tell us about the name?

The name started out as a joke-meets-a-message. The idea was that I am an intellectual snob who was shunning, i.e. poo poo-ing, some of the less savory aspects of black culture, and endorsing the more artistic and high cultural side. In reality, I'm not much of a snob, nor I have I ever been, but the name is very catchy and memorable, which was another reason why I chose it.

**Who is your audience? **

My audience is primarily African American, mostly female, but [there's]a significant portion of men. The men don't always comment even though they make up more than 40 percent of the readership. I also have a significant white and conservative readership, despite the fact that the blog has a Liberal slant. I'd like to think that's because I don't engage in demagoguery, so they feel safe in commenting on the site.

What is your goal?

My goal is to continue to grow the site until it becomes a blogging-meets-news-meets-social networking hub for like-minded individuals, aka, "snobs" of all types. I'd like to bring on more writers and editors and really create a full service news site with a strong, seriously funny slant.

What are you proudest of?

I most proudest of how far the blog has come, from a little blogspot site to what it is today, and what it's potential could be. I'm still amazed that people are drawn to it, and that it resonates so well in the web community as well as in the media. I'm very humbled by how fast I've grown.

You started out working in newspapers, do you still consider yourself a journalist?

I do. I feel that as long as I work in some form of the media I'm still a journalist and must adhere to journalism ethics. I think that is another thing that makes my blog a tad different. There is some element of quality control and news judgment that goes on. I don't post a lot of rumor and hearsay, I try to get even basic gossip sourced somehow. It's important to have standards.

How do you get your news?

I read a lot of blogs, newspapers and magazines and I watch a lot of television news. I'm a voracious consumer of news. I love it. I've watched 60 Minutes almost every Sunday of my life since I was about nine years old.

Any thoughts on the future of news?

I feel that things are change very rapidly right now, and it's been a tough adjustment for newspapers. People can get the news at such instantaneous speeds that stories break and die before people can even get the chance to fully understand them. I think traditional media will eventually make the adjustment to this, but I'm still concerned how newspapers, regional and national, will be able to make money when a majority of people online believe news should be free.

What blogs do you read?

I read Salon.com, Slate.com, Huffington Post, Gawker, "Wonkette"http://wonkette.com/, Jezebel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jack and Jill Politics, AverageBro, Se7enMagazine, Awesomely Luvvie"www.awesomelyluvvie.com/, Politico, Racialicious, Angry Asian Man, TPMMuckracker, Crooks and Liars, The Negro Intellectual, What About Our Daughters, What Would Thembi Do, Michelle Obama Watch, and many, many more. I could go on forever.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?

I think through groups like Afrosphere and gatherings like "Blogging While Brown": http://www.bloggingwhilebrown.com/ show the ability of the black blogosphere and its potential. There are just so many great writers doing amazing things who have organized amazing things... like Gina McCaul of What About Our Daughters, who spoke out on the Dunbar Village case and called leaders to task when they came out in support of the perpetrators, but not the woman and child who were attacked and brutalized. There is a strong activism streak among many black bloggers on everything from anti-tasering campaigns to campaigns to improve (or marginalize) BET.

It's really very exciting and fascinating. People underestimate the power of black bloggers, but they're on the come-up and they've made things happen. The Jena 6 was almost exclusively something that was pushed by black bloggers and black radio before it made it to the mainstream. It's really rather incredible what people can do with a little internet real estate and a voice.

I have to say, it was fabulous turning 51 years old on Facebook.

The well wishes started pouring in on the night before my birthday and they kept coming the day after, too. Friends from junior high, high school, college, past jobs, former neighbors, fellow travelers all weighed in on my Facebook wall.

According to a January study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, adults between 45 and 54 make up 19 percent of the population on social networks. However, an earlier Pew tracking survey found the number of adults joining social networks is growing quickly, from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent by December 2008.

Believe me, I know. At times, it seems as if every week brings a new friend request from someone I haven't seen in more years than I care to admit. After a few Facebook missteps, I've learned it's best to friend lest I offend. And it's often best to act quickly.

"X is devastated you won't friend them," one of my Facebook connections chided me about an unanswered invitation from someone I hadn't seen in decades.

Friend Now, Remember Later

In that case, I had been swamped by work. But sometimes, sometimes, I just can't quite place the person. Take the time I got a friend request where the only thing I could see that we had in common was where we lived. No message. No mutual friends. No nothing. Something in the name must have struck a chord because instead of hitting the ignore button I just let it sit. About a year later, I was flipping through my college alumni magazine. It all came back to me. As a result, I've adopted something of a "friend now, remember later" policy.

I mark these mistakes down to being a digital immigrant traveling in a very foreign land.

Facebook, after all, was created by a Harvard University student in 2004 for a generation used to online life, as NYU professor Clay Shirky explained in a 2007 New York Times interview:

"To some extent, a generation gap is already apparent in the Facebook population," said Shirky. "Younger people will use it more naturally and differently than older folks."

Don't I know that. Sometimes when I'm talking to my younger brothers, both digital natives, I feel like my grandmother might have felt the first time we handed her the remote for a VCR.

"Eh, now, how do I write on somebody's wall?" I've asked. And I still can't figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do so that my Twitter and Facebook feeds mirror each other.

My younger brothers have kindly walked me through the process, tweaking my profile and installing privacy settings. I didn't even know there was a privacy option.

It's not surprising they would prize privacy. According to an earlier Pew study, younger people are more concerned with online privacy. Maybe it has something to do with those stories we hear about pictures of people partying popping up in their professional lives with less than optimal results.

I don't so much worry about that at this age. But there have been some unexpected meet-ups between the older respected professional I've become and the "free spirit" I once was.

Nestled in between two sedate "Happy Birthday" greetings from colleagues was this message from a junior high school friend:

Happy Birthday, Dori! It was close to this time of year a million years ago when we ran away from home together just for the adventure ;)

A million years, many lifetimes ago and a time and place I may have forgotten were it not for Facebook.

Unintended Uses

I once read that one of the underappreciated aspects of diversity is that when we create something for one group it often benefits many others. For example, curb cuts for people in wheel chairs have also been a great boon to people pushing baby strollers or pulling luggage.

(I would link to the citation but I read it either before Delicious.com was invented or before I knew how to use it.)

I thought about that on my birthday. I doubt anyone initially involved with setting up Facebook to help college students meet envisioned sharing it with people their parent's age. But here we are, searching for each other, surprising each other and supporting each other.

For all the people who took the time to wish me a happy birthday -- thank you. Each one of you helped make it the best birthday ever.

The graphic footage made its way around the world, sparking outrage. Two weeks later, Johannes Mehserle, the former BART officer accused of killing Grant, was charged with murder, a first according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper reported that the Alameda Country District Attorney representatives could not remember a previous time when an on-duty officer had been charged in a fatal shooting in the last 20 years.

This Wednesday, some six months after the shooting, a fellow BART officer had to retract his initial testimony that Grant disobeyed police orders when the video evidence clearly contradicted that claim. On Thursday, a judge ordered Mehserle to stand trial for murder.

Racial Tensions with Police

I thought about this recently as I sat in New York City with a friend who was almost numb with anger over the death of Omar J. Edwards, a black off-duty New York City Police officer shot in the back by a white officer who says he mistook Edwards for an armed criminal.

"It just doesn't stop," my friend said.

The relationship between police and the black community has long been tense. According to the New York Times, cases of black officers shot by their white colleagues, though rare, date back as far as 1940. But until relatively recently, that tension has simmered just beneath the nation's consciousness.

When I was a young reporter in Bakersfield, CA some 25 years ago, an African American man with ties to the Bakersfield Police Department was stopped by police officers as he drove down the highway at night. With their guns drawn, they ordered him out of the car and down to the ground until he was able to prove his identity.
The only other African American reporter at the paper and I assured the editor that this was an entirely likely scenario. To give the editor some context, my colleague, a black man, described how he was often stopped by police as he walked home at night.

But this was years before the term "driving while black" had entered the general vocabulary and some of my colleagues didn't think it plausible that the police would pull over a motorist and start brandishing their guns for no reason.

A few years later, an editor at another paper would tell me how, when he was coming of age, the local police officers would take him home to face his family when his actions bordered on the criminal. Having grown up learning that the police were as likely to harm you as help you, hearing this editor's experience both enraged and amazed me.

More importantly, it also helped me understand in part why it was so difficult for some people to believe that the police they relied on to protect them could turn on others without provocation.

Rodney King Video

Less than a decade after I left Bakersfield, the world saw police officers assaulting Rodney King, thanks to the technological advances that made video cameras available to the average affluent person.

Since then, other cases have surfaced to receive national attention. Most notably Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who was reaching for his wallet when four police, who later claimed they thought he was reaching for a gun, fired off 41 rounds, killing him. And, more recently, Sean Bell was shot and killed by New York City police officers in the early morning hours before his wedding.

In both of these cases, the officers involved were acquitted of all charges stemming from the shootings.

It's likely this fraught history between communities of color and law enforcement played a role in the number of people who pulled out their cell phones in the early hours of New Year's Day. According to the Oakland Tribune, many said they started recording because they thought the officers were abusing their authority.

For some, the only solace as they watch the case unfolding is that after years of frustration at the lack of police accountability in the deaths of citizens, there is finally a new weapon of choice against police brutality: the cell phone.

As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table.

As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner, it's not even in the kitchen."

Two reports posted on the same day serve to remind us that the news industry has ignored diversity at its own peril.

In a bit of irony, in one case the very technological innovation the newspaper turned to in order to better connect with its readers gave a graphic illustration of just how out of touch the paper was to some parts of its communities.

On March 12, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released findings that showed that less than half the population would care if their local newspapers disappeared. That same day a post on the Neiman Journalism Lab site about The Baltimore Sun's decision to live-stream its weekday story conferences inadvertently gave us clue as to just why that might be.

"As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community 'a lot.' Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available," the Pew study says.

In his post for the Nieman Lab about the Sun's live-streaming experiment, Tim Windsor said about observing the story meeting, "...for those who do watch -- especially those who haven't been able to attend or participate in an actual news meeting -- the visit can be eye-opening."

Actually, the screenshot alone was eye-opening, though in a sadly predictable way. There we saw 13 people gathered around the table charged with putting together a newspaper in a city in which the majority of the population is African-American. At that particular table, on that particular day all were white and most were male.

Newspapers Out of Step

To be clear, when you look at the figures from previous ASNE workforce surveys it's obvious that the Sun is not the only newspaper out of step with its community.
According to the last year's figures [PDF file], people of color make up a bit more than 13 percent of the professional staff in the nation's newspapers. There is little to suggest that the picture will be vastly changed when the new figures are released.

By contrast, people of color make up 33 percent of the general population. The disconnect shows.

Content audits continue to demonstrate that people of color are over-represented in stories about crime, entertainment and sports and under-represented in stories about business, lifestyle and everyday life.

For the most part, the contributions, the rich vibrancy and the mundane aspects of the lives of people of color are no more present in the printed pages of our daily newspapers than are the people of color around the Sun's story meeting.

With a growing number of websites run by and for people of color it should not come as a surprise that increasingly people will turn to a source that depicts their lives in all of the complexity, and not solely concentrate on the pathological.

Overall trends show that in general people are getting their news from the Internet rather than from newspapers, according to a study from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news," the Dec. 2008 study said.

As newspapers struggle to keep their footing and retain their place in our democracy, there has been increasing talk about the need to give the public courses in media literacy. The thinking behind this movement is that if people truly understood the role the news media plays in the public discourse they would understand the danger to democracy if papers vanish.

The problem with that solution is that it ignores the fact many feel that news organizations routinely paint a stereotypical and one-dimensional picture of their lives. In those cases, many people believe mainstream news organizations detract from rather than add to the public discourse around issues important to their lives.

For the public to be moved to truly rally to save the media, the media must first fully cover all aspects of our communities.

Looking at the picture painted by the Baltimore Sun's story conference, ASNE's census figures and content analysis findings, it seems that the media might benefit from public literacy more than the public needs media literacy.

Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest.

Like is true with many issues, our perception of what happened is often shaped by our fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Perhaps because I live in Oakland and spent some years in Detroit, the home of one of the worst riots of the last century or maybe because the riots of the 1960s were the backdrop of my childhood, but to me a riot is a greater event than what happened in Oakland last week.

To me a riot is a city come to a standstill. It's big and it's terrifying, not only to the people who are there, but to most of the people who live in the city, if not the rest of the country. It's five days, 43 dead. It's almost 1,200 injured and more than 700 arrested, in the case of the 1967 Detroit riot that forever changed the face of that city. Or it's six days, 54 dead, almost 2,400 injured, 12,111 arrested and $1 billion in damage in the case of the riot that swept through Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers who were seen on tape beating Rodney King.

It's something that collectively changes the way we think about that city, the country, ourselves.

This is not to minimize what happened in Oakland. Breaking storefront windows, burning cars and scaring local merchants are outside the bounds of tolerable behavior.
But it is to say that I think we need to pick our words carefully so that we are comparing oranges to oranges.

As we attempt to find a common language that will bridge the multi-cultural communities that make up this country, perhaps we need to be even more precise in our language. If we deem everything a riot, what words do we use to distinguish between what happened in Oakland and what happened in Detroit? Don't we owe it to our audience to find words that will help them understand the scale of the events we are reporting?

As I discussed this with journalists around the country, it was clear there was no agreed upon definition of a riot, or even if a riot should be called a riot or a rebellion.
In one email exchange, a journalist asked "The question here is: Do we challenge the existing definition of a riot to something more nuanced to embrace what people have become accustomed to think of as BEING a riot."

For instance, after the Rodney King verdict many called what happened in Southern Cal a "riot." 
However, coming from another perspective, many also called it a "rebellion" or an "uprising."

Where you sat in relation to those verdicts has a lot to do with how you view what happened afterward -- meaning, if you're a person of color who has been harassed, or even beaten by a cop in your lifetime, you might have viewed what happened as an uprising. If you're a person who has had innocuous interactions with the police and justice system, it might be crystal clear to you: "That was a riot."

Another member of the email exchange shot back defending the use of the word riot and resoundingly rejecting the notion of an uprising, arguing that it doesn't matter if some of the people involved in the violence felt it was justified.

After the 1992 Los Angeles riot, a columnist asked what do you do when you've marched and you've sung and you've staged sit-ins and non-violent protests and still you're told you don't count? I don't think he or anybody who uses the words rebellion, uprising or civil unrest was attempting to justify the massive destruction that devastated portions of the city. I think he was trying to lay bare the sense of hopelessness and frustration that can trigger a level of anger that has sent otherwise sane people into the streets.

It's not a point of view that comes naturally to some segments of our society, just as it's hard for some segments to have faith in a fair police investigation into the shooting of an unarmed African American man.

For journalists, I don't think it's as important for us to agree or disagree with these opinions. I think it's important that we continually evaluate the words we use and constantly ask ourselves if we saw the same thing members of our community saw.
Help us as we try to sort through these questions. What did you see and how do you think we should describe public acts of violence? Are we being too soft by refusing to call something a riot? Is there ever a reason to refer to any act of violence as a rebellion or uprising?

Please give us your thoughts in the comments below, and it would be great if you could include your fault lines background when you give your interpretation of what happened in Oakland.

A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com.

There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from questioning whether the number of unwed mothers in the African American community really has increased, to the intellectual laziness that prompts people to rely on history to predict the future.

In one post headlined "OK Now I'm Reaching," he used the lyrics of a Bill Withers song as the jumping-off point to discuss Andrew Bacevich's book "The Limits of Power," an examination of how the American public's collective refusal to forgo gas-guzzling cars and live within our means is at the heart of our current crisis. Coates said the following:
"The thing I always liked about Bill Withers' 'Use Me' was that it was a man's critique of a dysfunctional relationship. Unlike a lot of rappers, Withers doesn't blame the girl, he blames himself, going so far as to say, "It ain't too bad the way you using me, because I sure am using you to do that thing we do." In fact he laughs at the people trying to help him, much as one might picture people laughing at some lefty for telling them "they aren't voting their interest." In that respect, I think Bacevich's critique is a man's critique of another, very similar, dysfunctional relationship. It's easy to think we've been conned into this current crisis. But what if this is the world as we want it? I think it's imperative to never forget that humans are animals. What if, in the words of Bob, we're just fulfilling the book? What if it isn't even dysfunctional? What if this is just who we are?"

Here is the 32-year-old writer and blogger in his own words:

How would you describe your blog?
Hmm. That's tough. It's basically Ta-Nehisi thinking out loud. That really is the essence of it.

How did you come to the attention of the Atlantic?
I pitched them a piece on Bill Cosby. I'd been working on it, while I was a staff writer at Time. But I got laid off and had all this great reporting. I just took it with me to the Atlantic.

How long were you blogging before you moved?
About eight months.

Who is your audience and do you think it has changed since you moved to the Atlantic?
Well, the Atlantic is huge, and traffic has grown about tenfold. The obvious answer is it's gotten whiter. But that's not because black folks have stopped reading. More likely, it's because there's just more white people out there.

Do you think the presidential race has increased your readership?
Unquestionably. I'm trying to figure out how I'll hold on, now that it's over.

What is your goal?
To be a great writer.

What are you proudest of?
My family -- my 8-year-old son, Samori, and beautiful partner, Kenyatta.

What is your background?
Raised in West Baltimore, amongst a gaggle of kids. Went to Howard University, and dropped out when I found writing. Been living in New York now for about eight years.

Do you think of yourself as a journalist?
Hmmm. I think of myself as a writer.

Where do you see the future of journalism?
I have no idea. I love long-form, and I'm most concerned about its future.

What blogs do you read?
Sullivan
PostBourgie
Blacksnob
Matt Yglesias
The TNR blogs
Tapped
Ezra Klein

How do you get your news?
From the New York Times and the blogosphere.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?
I don't know. I'm not sure about the power of the blogosphere, much less the black one. I hope we thrive, obviously.

At the same time, others privately wondered if there are some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity.

It is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to avoid the frequent appearance of all-white panels to discuss race relations. That lamentable pattern and other media missteps, such as a New York Times story on the shifting African-American landscape that did not quote any African-American sources, were vivid examples of why the traditional media's reputation and credibility depend on their ability to diversify their ranks as quickly as possible.

The need for diverse voices has been a longstanding refrain since the 1960s, when news executives across the country realized they did not have staffs equipped to cover the Black Power movement and the ensuing unrest, then the biggest story sweeping the country.

Some significant gains were made in the following decades. Journalists of color went from 4 percent of the workforce before their newsroom presence stalled at 13 percent, where it remains today. The numbers for broadcast media are better, with people of color making up almost 24 percent of the workforce. But since the urban unrest settled, the urgency to develop an ethnically- and racially-diverse staff was slowly replaced by diversity fatigue, with some news executives openly questioning whether having a more representative staff truly makes a difference.

"We have racial diversity in my newsroom, but everyone went to the same college and lives in the same neighborhood, so we don't have any real diversity of thought," went the most common refrain.

Journalists and media managers of color countered that a newsroom culture that values conformity and rejects alternate visions of news events has trained journalists of color to keep their dissenting views to themselves.

Phillip Dixon, then deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, explained why so many journalists and media managers of color were leaving the industry in "Voices of Anger/Cries of Concern," a study released at the 2001 convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

"They leave frustrated and worn down by trying and failing to connect with managers and peers, who, for all the talk of embracing diversity, still haven't taken seriously the idea that they and their newspapers would be better off if they took some time to learn the ways of black folks and Latino folks ... and any folks who are other than white folks," Dixon wrote. "They leave frustrated and worn down by still having to pitch stories the newspaper should be pouncing on."

Diversity Can Make a Difference

This election cycle, with the sometimes sharp contrast between what appeared in the traditional media and in the black blogosphere, showed how much a difference diversity can make.

When former secretary of state Colin Powell endorsed Obama, traditional journalist Tom Brokaw immediately asked whether this was simply the case of one African-American politician endorsing another. Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN's Reliable Sources, repeated the question hours later. Soon it was reverberating through the media.

On The Root, David Swerdlick offered a different perspective.

"The signature link between Powell and Obama is not race. It is their shared belief that even a superpower with the most capable and best equipped military in the world is wise to use its military power only after diplomacy has been applied and exhausted. It's an outlook that rejects the 'attack first, discuss later' preemption doctrine ... espoused by the Bush administration and embraced by McCain," Swerdlick wrote.

While a great deal of media attention was paid to the conflict sparked by Rep. John Lewis' observation that Sen. John McCain's campaign was reminiscent of former George Wallace's presidential campaigns, very little time was spent examining the merits of Lewis' comparison.

In the blogosphere, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who blogs for The Atlantic, observed that Wallace began his career as a liberal and turned to race-baiting only after losing the 1958 Democratic primary for governor of Alabama.

"This was a political crossroads for Wallace. (His opponent) ran with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Wallace had spoken against, while Wallace was endorsed by the NAACP.² After the election, aide Seymore Trammell recalled Wallace saying, 'Seymore, you know why I lost that governor's race?... I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.'²[4] In the wake of his defeat, Wallace adopted hard-line segregationism, and used this stand to court the white vote in the next gubernatorial election," Coates wrote. He used quotes from Wallace's entry on Wikipedia.

The politics of racial fear has a long tradition, and Coates' post is a reminder that the road from racial tolerance to racial expediency can be very short, a phenomenon worth remembering as analysts sort through the historical significance of Obama's victory.

Then there was the post-election coverage.

After months of reading about the "Bradley effect," and the scattered reports of racist rants at some McCain-Palin rallies, one had to wonder whether Obama's victory left some white voters feeling vindicated. Yet, for all the good stories written about how African Americans felt about the historic election, almost nothing was written from other racial and ethnic points of view, an omission that blogger Cheryl Contee noted on Jack and Jill Politics, a blog created as an outlet for black middle-class political views. In setting up the context for a post from a white Obama supporter, Contee, who writes under the name Jill Tubman, wrote: "I think black people need to hear and understand the white reaction at a deeper level than just the 'yay isn't history nifty!' angle that we're getting on TV right now."

Three different stories illustrated three different approaches to each. It is understandable that predominantly white traditional media and writers of color online take different angles on stories, because they see things differently. As we teach in Fault Lines, the Maynard Institute's diversity framework, race, class, gender, generation and geography shape everyone's perceptions of each other and events. Two people with very different perspectives along fault lines can cover the same story and walk away with very different perceptions.

What is important now it that we in the media understand that just as Obama's candidacy forced us to deal with race in a much more central way, so will his presidency. As a result, it is time to not only step up our efforts to diversify staffs, but also be more open to listening to those diverse voices.

The blogosphere has proven that diversity is not window dressing; it's a window into other worlds. That is a lesson the traditional media would do well to apply and replicate.

Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity.

On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the racially awkward comments made by Sen. Joe Biden to the fact that Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps listens to rapper Lil Wayne before he competes.

Some of the most interesting posts are triggered by breaking news, such as after the acquittal of the police officers who shot an unarmed groom on the eve his wedding. That afternoon Williams posted a link to the University of Chicago's Stereotyping and Prejudice Research Laboratory that where you can assess whom you would shoot and how quickly you would shoot them according to their race.

Below Lauren Williams describes her work in her own words.

How would you describe your blog?

Stereohyped is a black-interest blog where visitors can get politics, current events, entertainment, and celebrity gossip all in one place. Depending on a news cycle, some days it will look like a gossip blog and some days it will look like a political blog, but I generally try to stay in the center on the Barack and Beyonce spectrum.

Who is your audience?

When Stereohyped started, I thought the audience would be made up of 20- or 30-something black professional women. I was right, for the most part, but I never could have guessed that beyond the core demographic, Stereohyped would attract so many different readers of all ages, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. The audience is definitely a mixing bowl, and I love that there is a wide variety of perspectives in the comment section.

What are your goals?

Stereohyped is still relatively young in the blog world, and my goals are simple. I would like to see the site continue to grow, attract more readers, and maybe inform a few people and change a few minds along the way.

What are you proudest of?

Before Stereohyped launched, I was very worried that my voice, my style, and the topics that interested me were not going to appeal to a significant number of readers. I was pretty sure that I would eventually have to compromise my vision in some way in order to increase readership and make myself more appealing to a wide range of readers. That hasn't happened. I'm proud that I've been able to remain true to myself and build a steady, loyal readership at the same time.

What is your background?

I have a Masters degree in Magazine, Newspaper, and Online Journalism from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and I began my career as a newspaper reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. After a year on the education beat, I decided that traditional journalism wasn't for me and began a switch to the online world that would eventually lead me to Stereohyped.

Do you think of yourself as a journalist?

Yes. Is what I do for a living journalism? Sometimes. For better or worse, bloggers are not governed by the same stringent ethical guidelines as traditional journalists, and there is a much higher premium placed on entertaining readers. This results in a lot of bad information floating through the blogosphere -- bad information that mainstream journalists sometimes pick up! Having a journalism background helps me to wade through this, and if I'm knowingly posting an unsubstantiated rumor I'll label it as such. But just like a columnist at a daily, I'm in the information gathering and delivery business, with a dose of personal opinion thrown in. My methods are different -- although I do some traditional reporting for the blog occasionally -- but the general objective is the same.

Where do you see the future of journalism?

Online, all the way. Sadly, I don't think that traditional print journalism will be able to stay afloat as people turn to the internet for their information more and more. And even though a lot of traditional journalists hate blogs and bloggers, I think the two warring groups have begun to forge a symbiotic relationship that will continue to grow. At this point, the younger generation of journalists probably read -- and get their enterprise ideas -- from blogs just as much as bloggers read and get their ideas from newspapers and magazines.

What blogs do you read?

Too many to list! For the fluff, I read all of the major black (and "mainstream," for that matter) gossip blogs. For the substance, I like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as well was black political blogs like Jack & Jill Politics. There is a proliferation of style blogs out there that are geared toward blacks that I find pretty addictive, like Shake Your Beauty (full disclosure: my sister writes it), Afrobella, and The Fashion Bomb. Really, I could go on for hours. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs covering all different topics. I'm definitely a blog junkie.

How do you get your news?

I get my news from a variety of sources, but the big three are tips from readers, online newspapers and news magazines, and other blogs. I write about 14-15 posts a day, and when I'm not actually writing, I'm scouring the web for news stories and inspiration for original features.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?

It can't be denied! A hallmark moment happened last year with the Jena Six. Before most newspapers even made mention that anything was going on, entire blogs were devoted to this particular cause. The mainstream media would have never taken notice if it weren't for the serious coverage the case was getting on black blogs. The black blogosphere was instrumental in calling attention to the issue and effecting change in the case.

Even though its 2008, it is still a struggle to get "black" topics -- ranging from criminal justice to entertainment -- covered with any sort of regularity or depth in the media. The black blogosphere not only balances that out, it also serves as a constant reminder to journalists that these things are happening in the black community, and people are hungry for consistent information. I'm not talking about the occasional, lazily-reported piece, for which the reporter camped outside of the local black church and area beauty parlors and barber shops for quotes. These annoy me to no end. Do you know why? I don't go to church, and I do my own hair. For that matter, I don't have an absentee father, I don't know anyone who is in jail, and I went to college and graduate school. Most of the people I know are like me. There's a larger community out there than is portrayed on cable news, in the papers, and even on television and in movies. I like to think that the black blogosphere is a microcosm of that larger community.

The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media.

While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised remarks to a fellow panelist during a taping at the Fox News Channel, bloggers and members of listservs immediately began debating whether the remarks signaled, or should signal, a generational shift.

To its credit, The New York Times did tackle the issue of the shifting political landscape in the African American community. Yet, in a move that called into question the piece's credibility, the reporter chose not to quote any African American sources on the subject, opting instead to rely on the expertise of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign manager and a white professor from Emory University.

The last assured us that harsh words from Jesse Jackson would in no way cause the African American community to turn its back on Obama and then went on to recount an anecdote that left you wondering what it had to do with the Jackson-Obama flap.
"He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone," The Times told us.

Over on the web, the response, if you knew where to look, gave much greater insight into what people in the African American community were actually thinking. " The 32-year-old blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this on his blog:

My Dad is gonna kill me. But here's Jesse -- on Fox News no less -- telling some other dude that he'd like to cut Obama's nuts out. Nice. I'm not even sure this hurts Obama in anyway. Even Jesse's own son condemned him. There is a certain strain of the civil-rights era that really just needs to have a Jack and Coke and call it a day. It's not that we aren't grateful. We so really are. But this is getting embarrassing...

Both accounts agree that Obama was not hurt by Jackson's remarks. However, it struck me that reading the mainstream media was sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation strangers were having about you while reading the web was very much like having an important conversation that you are fairly certain no one else is bothering to listen to.

Neither provides the public with the entirety of the information it needs to understand what's at stake and to make informed decisions. And both remind you of how disengaged we can be from each other in this country.

It was that disconnect that the New Yorker got caught up in when it attempted to take on some of the erroneous ideas people have about the Obamas. The problem, as many pointed out, is that it's very difficult to satirize a community you don't have much contact with.

With newspaper and broadcast staffs still between 75 and 85 percent white and the country's population a little over 30 percent people of color, it's not a surprise that there is a disconnect between the journalists and those they cover. Nor is it a surprise that people of color are using the web to create a more robust and nuanced conversation. The trick is going to be in finding a way to bring our separate conversations together, no matter the medium.

McLarin does not base her argument on the fact that a Princeton and Harvard University graduate, married to a man with the political savvy to come from behind to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, is not likely to be guilty of such a political misstep. Nor does she argue that someone who has spent decades of her life navigating the racial fault lines is not likely to step on a cultural landmine by spewing racial epitaphs.

Her argument is more basic, at least to many African Americans.

"When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody 'whitey?'" she asks, before pointing out that despite what the rumor implies, African Americans just don't have a large and widely agreed on vocabulary of names used to disparage white people. The exception, as has been pointed out, can be found in old media from the late 1960s and 1970s, such as "The Jeffersons."

Given, as I have repeatedly pointed out, we continue to live in a largely segregated society and our online habits seem to be only driving us deeper into our niches, it's not surprising that behavior seen on an old sitcom could be used to fuel a rumor meant to torpedo a current day presidential candidate.

I thought about this at the Knight News Challenge Conference a few weeks ago when Jay Rosen was talking about The Daily Me versus The Daily Us. The Daily Us would presumably give us insight into our shared problems and shared dreams. Sitting in a room so far from my neighborhood, a place where for some the only work available is filling your shopping cart up with cans and bottles fished out of the trash cans, I wondered, really wondered, if we know enough about each other to even have an idea of what our separate dreams and problems might look like, let alone be a point where we consider those dreams and problems shared.

Despite talk of the digital divide, the Internet, where it's free to post, as long as you have the time and a computer, is supposed to be the great equalizer, the place where your we can learn about each other's dreams and problems.

The difficulty is that we have to actually be curious enough to surf for those sites that will provide a glimpse into the worlds and thoughts of our neighbors. It's obvious from my posts that I don't think enough of us, including myself, take the time.

Today, instead of complaining, or hectoring, or otherwise pointing out our shared failures, I'm going to list a number of sites I enjoy. And, in the weeks to come, I will be posting interviews with the bloggers from those sites. My hope is that as I introduce you to new sites and new bloggers, you will return the favor. Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, I do believe one of our shared problems is our continued ignorance about how we live, and, clearly, about how we talk.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Stereohyped

Angry Asian Man

Too Sense, Race, Politics and Hip-Hop

Racialicious

Jack & Jill Politics

There are more, but that gives you a start.

Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at official sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro. Sponsored by Nokia, Pangia Day included films produced with video cameras from mobile phones the company gave out to filmmakers around the world.

The overall films, which ran the gamut from heart wrenching to the lighthearted, were punctuated with shorts that had people across the globe describe their interpretation of a simple human emotion.

Love was demonstrated by a couple dancing in Uganda, a boy giving his mother a flower in Mozambique, a mother kissing her child in India and two girls arm in arm in Guatemala. The simple concept, which included ruminations on sorrow, fear and dance, was a rich and visual reminder that no matter our race, our country, our age or our class, we do all experience the same range of emotions, making it in some ways the most affecting part of the day.

Watching such a diverse group of people reacting to one set of emotions made me wonder what would happen if we tried a similar experiment in this country. But, instead of having it revolve around a shared emotion, what if we built it around a shared experience?

With the presidential election, just as the primary before it, sure to touch on all the fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography, perhaps that would be the perfect national event to build a national Pangia Day around.

In 2000, African American and older Jewish voters said their complaints were largely ignored when they said their votes were negated by faulty ballots and suspect screening at polling places across Florida. In 2004 there was a great deal of talk about the youth vote and some dismissive talk about the black vote. In the end, pundits said the youth vote disappointed and the black conservative vote surprised. All this, we heard through the filter of the mainstream media.

Just as we saw the surprising and the universal with Pangia Day, our own experiment with Election Day might astonish us with what we have in common and tickle us by illustrating our national eccentricities. Now that we have identified the national event to build Pangia Day around, we would also do well to take a page out of the original event and show the results on one day around the country.

Just as we need an event around which to build global understanding, so do we need to build national understanding. Let Pangia Day be a model.

Things were different in the black blogosphere.

It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in New York City.

The blog Too Sense reprinted an excerpt from the magazine ColorLines, that found that the majority of people killed by the New York City Police department between 2000 and 2007 were African American.

Over at Stereohyped, Lauren Williams wrote about a University of Chicago study that looked at the role race played in an officer's decision to shoot at suspects.

"Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites)," she quoted the report as saying.

She included a link to the Stereotyping and Prejudice Research test which allows individuals to see how they would do if they had to decide whether to shoot or not.

Over at Jack and Jill Politics concern was raised that verdict was a sign of things to come.

"That's my concern with the Sean Bell verdict. With violations being punished less often and less harshly within the department, and these cops facing no consequences for pumping 50 shots at three unarmed black men, things will only get worse," they wrote.

Even Bossip, a blog devoted to celebrity news devoted a couple of posts to the verdict.

The lack of coverage outside the black blogosphere did not go unnoticed on Too Sense, a blog that uses the tagline Race, Politics and Hip-Hop.

"Can't help but notice that the luminaries of the progressive blogosphere are completely silent on the Sean Bell verdict. Nothing from Drum, Yglesias, Marshall, Atrios, Klein and on and on," wrote dnA.

A few days later, dnA posted a response to that post from Kos, who essentially said that while police brutality is an important issue, it's not an issue that speaks to his expertise or his audience.

"But for this blog, unless it touches upon electoral concerns, it's generally not going to get covered. That has nothing to do with whether it's "important" or not, and more to do with me covering what personally interests me most and is geared towards what my audience expects. Police brutality and unequal justice are both important issues, but not within my scope of expertise. I'd rather let people who know those issues better discuss them and I can focus on the stuff that I know best," he wrote in an excerpt posted on Too Sense.

Fair enough, but as more and more people move to getting their information from the blogosphere, the disparity of coverage around the Sean Bell verdict, and its underlying issues, is another warning sign that soon we in this country will literally not be on the same page.

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission, the seminal report that laid some of the blame for the riots that swept the country in the early and mid-1960s on an all white news media, all of us need to think about the societal ramifications of staying within our sphere of interest.

The movie Race to Execution makes a similar argument, noting that once the jury composition tips in favor of white men, the chances it will deliver a the death penalty verdict rises dramatically.

In this case, the Harvard Professor based her assertion on the results of the test she designed that measures your automatic reaction to images of diverse people and positive and negative words. According to her research, almost 90 percent of white people demonstrate a bias against African-Americans, https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.

Many people, Banaji said, are not even aware they harbor these negative perceptions. "Are those people (who participate in the studies) bad? "No. . . . These names before us (in the tests) or these faces before us are going to pull from our gut thinking that's biased," she said, according to the Concord Monitor account of her testimorny.
While Banaji was testifying in a death penalty case, it obviously made me think about journalism.

Only days before Williams wrote about Banaji's testimony, she and other black bloggers had taken exception to what they considered the disparity of treatment given to Sen. Barak Obama and Sen. John McCain at the combined newspaper editors and publishers convention.

"At the American Society of Newspaper Editors annual meeting yesterday, moderators Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, of the Associated Press, offered McCain a selection of sweets, as well as coffee with cream and sugar. Oh, and a standing ovation. From a room full of reporters. Guess who didn't receive similar treatment?" Williams wrote in her daily blog, http://www.stereohyped.com.

In fairness, each of the three presidential candidates spoke at the conference and the setting for each was slightly different. It should also be noted that the mixed crowd included publishers and editors, and not everybody rose to their feet for McCain. However, to some, McCain was perceived to have received preferential treatment.
At that same conference, ASNE released the result of its annual census that measures the percentage of journalists of color working at the country's daily newspapers.
While this year the census showed a fractional uptick in the percentage of journalists of color, from 13.43 to 13.52 the actual number of people of color working in the industry dropped by almost 300.

Each year the release of the census reawakens the call for the nation's newspaper staffs to mirror the nation's population. To put that in perspective, people of color now account for 34 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S. census also tells us that the majority of people living n this country live in segregated neighborhoods, meaning that the media tends to define what we learn about each other. The problem with that is that content audits performed by the Maynard Institute and other organizations consistently show that people of color are overrepresented in stories about crime, entertainment and sports and underrepresented in stories about business, lifestyle and everyday life.

Banaji's work helps us understand that try as we might, we still cannot compensate for any latent biases we all most likely carry. Williams reminds us that our audience is watching closely.

BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos.

What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early adapters, but also the mobile technology has a high rate of penetration in that community. So the failure to post cannot be blamed on the digital divide of either race or class.

In some ways this reminds me of newspapers and ad agencies first forays into Spanish language content. Both industries simply translated their product directly from English to Spanish, without taking into account cultural differences. Since then, most businesses have learned that much can be lost in translation and you have to tailor the product for the audience.

The question arises, is this happening here, and are we missing a valuable opportunity to look at how the web can bring us closer together.

Part of the genius of this current time period is that technology is being invented to do one thing and then used to do another. Think of the USB flash drive. Originally invented for data transfer between computers, now commonly used by friends to swap their music collection, circumventing the music industry's old business model.

Now that we know what African American males are not doing with mobile technology, perhaps the time has come to learn what they are doing with it. At the least, the ensuing discussion will be interesting and it very well may yield new models of spreading news that we would not otherwise have thought of.

Would love to hear from you if you have any insights and/or answers.

It was hard not to be excited listening to all the technologists talking about the latest advances that will allow us to get news to once isolated people in Africa and India using mobile phones and other technology. Once again, it was driven home that no longer is the price of a computer a barrier to digital participation. The ubiquitous cell phone, as common in my neighborhood as the bikes people use for transportation, is now allowing us to get news to people all over the world.

Yet for all the talk about reaching other countries, there was very little talk about reaching people in my neighborhood. Ordinarily I would be annoyed, but not surprised. It's not news that so far the new media is not shaping up to be any more inclusive than the traditional media. In fact, some might argue that traditional media at least has a recognition for the need for diversity.

But this time I was a truly disappointed. Given that the talk around this year's election is the importance of the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the youth vote and that questions of class have cut through the entire election, I thought this might be the conference where we would get wind of some projects arming the young men in my neighborhood with the latest mobile technology so they could report on the election from the front lines. You need to know what going on so you know what to do, one of the speakers said. Well, how as journalists are we going to know what to do if we continue to fail to find out what's going with large segments of our community?

Perhaps I went to the meeting with a national version of Global Voices dancing in my mind. Not to be. And what a shame. Given the political commentary on blogs from Too Sense to Racialicious, it would not be hard to convene a group of bloggers of color around the election, or just about any other issue facing this country.

So I left excited and disappointed. Excited because I see how easy it could be. Disappointed because I saw how little progress has been made in reaching the totality of our communities.

As for the confusion, when I looked around the room I had a hard time making sense of the demographics. Again, it wasn't the lack of racial or ethnic diversity. I went in there expecting that. I also went in expecting that a meeting billing itself as a combination of computation and journalism might have an equal number of technologists and journalist. Not so much. The handful of journalists in the room were far out numbered.

So, just as I left wondering how we are really going to know what's going on in this country if we don't reach out to all the residents in our various communities, I also left wondering what happens to the craft of journalism if journalists abdicate responsibility for the technology that will drive the craft into the future.