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Washington, D.C. — For Robert L. Johnson, who heads Black Entertainment Television, the “digital divide” isn’t so much about economics as about a lack of “content” for African-American Netsurfers. And he aims to solve both issues—digital divide
and lack of black content with the recent launch of an ambitious black-oriented
Web portal, called BET.com.
“I think that the digital divide will be solved by creating emotionally engaging (Internet) content, making them (African-Americans) aware that it is available, and constantly showing that this tool will add value to their lives,” said Johnson during a BET launch press conference. “As far as the digital divide, I think that it is more attitudinal than economic, and we are going to do our best to solve that attitudinal problem.” The BET.com portal has four main “zones” of interest areas, including UrbanLife, Professional, Women and Family. And there are eight main informational “channels” that include Headlines, Music, Money, Lifestyles, Food, Health, Careers and LoveLine. While BET has a number of “content developers” on staff under the direction of veteran newswoman Retha Hill, the portal also has content partnerships with Reuters, and Fox, and with various portals and engines, such as DirectHit.com, Hollywood.com and Monster.Com Planned for a grand opening last November, the BET website went back to the drawing board in order to do further “focus group” testing on what African-American Internet users were looking for online. The new $35 million joint venture between BET, Microsoft, NewsCorp, and Liberty Media isn’t the only black-oriented website, but it promise to be one of the biggest effort to date. As BET.Com enters the fray of black-oriented websites,
it faces competition from such already established black portals as NetNoir.Com,
which enjoys the strong backing of AOL; the BlackVoices site which is backed
by the Tribune Company (Chicago); and the BlackFamilies website produced
by the interactive division of Cox enterprises.
A study released by the U.S. Commerce Department last summer reported that white Americans were more than twice as likely to own a computer as black Americans, with 40 percent of white households currently online, compared to 20 percent of black households. But Forrester Research, a noted Internet consulting firm, has estimated that one million African-American households will go online over the next year. Added to the number of African-American households already online this would lead to a figure of nearly 4 million black households using the Net. Here are the URLs of some established African-American
websites:
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