Black media has skewed heavily towards sports, entertainment, and social commentary for some time. While these are subjects that Black journalists should be covering and are needed to cover, it often feels like the variety is lacking in what Black journalists cover. Science, tech, gaming, healthcare, politics, design, and countless other fields are more than ripe for Black journalists to lend their perspectives and pens. This isn't to say Black journalists don't cover these fields. It is to suggest that Black journalists tend to comment on some fields proportionally more.
To help curtail this, and do more for this, MIT launched an HBCU Science journalism fellowship. It is geared toward students interested in science, health, and environmental journalism. Students selected for this fellowship will spend a week at MIT for a journalism summer camp, which will be followed by a year of mentorship by journalists in science.
What will be interesting to see is if MIT works closely with HBCUs that have journalism programs to incorporate some of them into the expansion and development of this fellowship as the years go on. There are several HBCUs with journalism programs and those students would greatly benefit from something like this.
The two inaugural students who will be fellows for this HBCU program will be two journalism students from North Carolina A&T.