The New York Times-20080128-Washington Post Starts an Online Magazine for Blacks

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Washington Post Starts an Online Magazine for Blacks

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In attempt to broaden its online audience, The Washington Post Company on Monday is to introduce an online magazine primarily for a black audience, with news and commentary on politics and culture, and tools for readers to research their family histories.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a writer and a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, is the editor in chief of the magazine, called The Root, which he conceived with Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the company. The magazine is based in Washington, free to readers and will be found at www.theroot.com.

Several well-known authors and scholars have agreed to contribute to The Root, including Malcolm Gladwell and William Julius Wilson. The managing editor is Lynette Clemetson, who was until recently a reporter in Washington for the The New York Times and previously was a national and foreign correspondent for Newsweek.

The magazine they describe could be seen as a more highbrow, political alternative to established magazines like Ebony and sites like BlackAmericaWeb.com and BlackVoices.com. The Root's emphasis on genealogy will set it apart from those competitors, which pay more attention to entertainment, lifestyle and consumption.

Much of the news and commentary, Ms. Clemetson said, will not have an explicitly black angle but will address issues like health care and housing.

The news segment of the site will collect reporting from other sources, sometimes picking up on stories that are not heavily covered by the mainstream media. In the section titled Views, Mr. Gates and Ms. Clemetson said, they want to present conflicting outlooks, countering the notion that there is a monolithic black point of view.

We didn't feel there is a place right now where right-wing and left-wing and centrist black commentators can get together in one space, Mr. Gates said.

The third major part of the new site, titled Roots, will have online tools for people to build their family trees, link to or add information to other people's trees and construct maps showing their ancestral trails. It will also urge people to have DNA testing, which can help them trace their backgrounds to specific ethnic groups and parts of the world. It will offer links to companies that do the testing.

One such company the site will direct people to, www.AfricanDNA.com, is co-owned by Mr. Gates, a relationship that would be prohibited at some publications.

I don't see a conflict of interest, he said, because The Root will fully disclose his roles and will link to every company that does the DNA testing.

Mr. Gates has developed a preoccupation with genealogy and helping black people reconstruct histories that were buried by the enslavement of people from Africa and by generations of illiteracy, families torn apart and exclusion from official records.

He heads a project that collects and preserves black publications, some dating to the early 19th century, which he says are an invaluable source of information. One of the things I want to create is a huge database of all the obituaries in all of these newspapers, he said.

Mr. Gates also sees The Root as a way of recreating the role of the black newspapers that once thrived in many major cities but have largely disappeared.

In the small town in western Maryland where he grew up, We would get in the black barbershops both The Pittsburgh Courier and The Baltimore Afro-American, he said, and people would read the papers and argue about the news.

Mr. Graham and Mr. Gates have known each other for years from serving together on the board of the Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University. They said The Root grew out of a series of casual conversations between them. Each man credited the other with the original idea.

The Root joins a small but rapidly growing roster of professionally produced publications that exist only on the Internet. This approach avoids printing and delivery costs but draws less advertising and circulation revenue. They are closely watched by newspaper and magazine companies, which are trying to envision what may be an all-digital future.

The Washington Post Company has some experience in the field as publisher of the online magazine Slate, which Mr. Graham said provided some of the technology and expertise that has gone into The Root. Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, is one of the people who have advised the creators of the new magazine.

I know it'll lose money at the outset, and I make no predictions about how long, Mr. Graham said. But obviously, we intend to make money eventually.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: The Root's emphasis on genealogy may set it apart from rivals. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a writer and Harvard professor, is the magazine's editor. (PHOTOGRAPH BY LIBRADO ROMERO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)