CEO of URL Media, S. Mitra Kalita, Shares Journalistic Insights
Posting: Monday, October 9, 2023
S. Mitra Kalita is the CEO of URL Media, a multi-platform network of high-performing Black and Brown media organizations. URL Media is partnering with JFP to expand the branded URL network.
S. Mitra Kalita has had a distinguished career in journalism and media that included roles at various news organizations. She has served as the Senior Vice President for News, Opinion, and Programming at CNN Digital and held positions at major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Quartz and The Washington Post.
Currently, she serves as the CEO and Co-Founder of URL Media which works with mainstream newsrooms to syndicate content and partner on diversity initiatives in content, staffing and culture.
To hear more about her experiences, we reached out to Ms. Kalita to share her thoughts.
S. Mitra Kalita
CEO of URL Media
Q. Tell us about URL Media’s mission and vision. What communities does it serve - and how? How does it differentiate itself from traditional news outlets?
URL Media is a network of media organizations that serve, support and center communities of color and whose leadership and teams represent these populations. We share advertising, amplify each other's content, and offer recruitment and executive placement services. We have 21 partner organizations and reach more than 24 million users.
We are different from other outlets in a few ways. One, we are a collaborative approach, which is not how media often work (example: the rush to be "first" or "exclusive"). Two, we just launched our website and it directs eyeballs and traffic to the partners. We are aggregating info but giving the credit where it's due: the outlets capturing stories on the ground. That's where we take our cues from and create our unique news grassroots agenda. Finally, I'd say we differ from mainstream media in our focus on serving distinct, direct communities with news, information, resources. We don't have a lot of debates over neutrality, objectivity or distance from our audiences. We want to know them, serve them, represent them. Thus there's trust, dialogue and engagement on both sides.
Q: Can you discuss the significance of partnering with and elevating the impact of Black and Brown-owned news organizations?
Because URL Media is a network of BIPOC owned and led media organizations, our model is a bit different. We are in service to high performing Black and Brown media companies that have trusted relationships with their audiences but need more visibility and revenues to help grow and create more long-term sustainability.
Additionally, we have URL Direct which is a series of URL-curated newsletters and other products that feature the excellent work of our partners as a way to amplify their content and make it more discoverable and relevant to broader audiences.
We also have a thriving recruitment arm that sources BIPOC talent to help diversify newsrooms and other businesses struggling to reach and serve diverse audiences. The recruitment business developed organically due to the decades-long problem of creating more diverse newsrooms especially in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. This was a classic case of seeing a need and filling it.
The third bucket of our current revenue mix is philanthropy. We have had success in securing several grants to help us launch and grow our network from an inaugural group of eight media organizations to now 21. This has been absolutely critical to our success, providing us with sufficient runway to test and learn over the past two years so that we could figure out our business model and how we can best support our partners. It is safe to say that - as a for-profit organization - some grants would have been off limits to us were it not for a fiscal sponsor.
Photo of S. Mitra Kalita and Sara Lomax | Provided by Janelle Zagala
Q. What do you believe are the most significant challenges and opportunities facing the industry today relating to representation of diverse and underserved communities?
We were born out of the pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020 but we and our partners have been doing this work for decades. We have real challenges to DEI, like the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling and other courts squashing efforts to support Black female entrepreneurs, but diversity is not a fad for us. It is a way of doing business. And that's important when we talk about the other crisis in our industry: economic sustainability, or lack thereof, of media models.
Notably in our industry, we often talk about diversity of revenue and diversity of people in different lanes. Not so at URL Media. The inability for mainstream media to appeal to core audiences of interest, as well as new audiences, is a direct outcome of its failure to disrupt itself on everything from how it makes money (print ads) to how it measures success (web impressions) to who it hires (white people).
Q: What are some examples of funded coverage for URL Media? What has been the impact of that coverage?
Thanks to a grant from the American Press Institute last year, we embarked on a listening project before midterm elections. We're really proud that we did not predict a "red wave," like some mainstream media outlets. We learned that framing questions in ways that assume audiences are already engaged in the political process can cut off opportunities for us to discover what people most need to know. We designed for this by prompting audiences to ask questions about “politics and participation” instead of asking questions about the midterms themselves.
Also, community listening does not need to be predicated on asking questions at all. Our outlets tend to position ourselves where conversations are already happening, and in particular where misinformation is percolating. And we all need to make our reporting relevant by connecting politics, policy and participation to people’s real lives and worlds. That includes being creative about where we’re listening online and also taking our listening efforts offline. This is a key lesson and framework as we head into 2024 elections.
Q. What do you and your funders see as a benefit of working with a fiscal sponsor - and how does that help URL Media accomplish its mission?
We are so grateful to Journalism Funding Partners for being there for us. As mentioned, philanthropy has been a growing source of support for URL Media and, in some cases, we are only able to unlock those resources through a fiscal sponsor. What I most appreciate about JFP has been its willingness to partner from the beginning, its understanding of our mission and model, and also its trust that many of the works we and our partners are taking on are charitable in scope--and more needed than ever.
Finally, there’s a divide right now on for-profit versus non-profit incorporation for ventures in journalism. I once heard that for-profits probably need to operate a bit more like non-profits, and non-profits need to operate a bit more like for-profits. Your tax status is not a business model. What fiscal sponsorship can do is serve as a bridge to unlock needed resources: to increase capacity, engage in charitable work that otherwise might not be commercially viable, and, importantly, better serve communities.
About URL Media: URL Media is a multi-platform network that creates scale without sacrifice, connects audiences to relevant news & information, and enables more economic viability for Black and Brown media organizations. They share content, distribution and other resources to enhance reach, expand revenue and build long-term sustainability.
Online: url-media.com
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Media Contact: Rusty Coats, Executive Director | rusty@jfp-local.org | (813) 277-8959
