New research from The Opportunity Agenda: African American men's media usage and opportunities for intervention

Submitted by Eleni Delimpaltadaki Janis
January 25, 2011

What TV and radio shows do African-American men tune in? Which newspapers and magazines do they read? Where do they spend their time online? Our new research identifies which media sources are likely to have the greatest impact on the thinking and attitudes of African-American men and offers a series of recommendations about where interventions may be most fruitful.

Across national media platforms, sports and music-related content are the most popular among African-American men. Mainstream media reaches larger numbers of African-American men and African-American adults in general than black-oriented media. However, black-oriented media has significantly higher concentrations of African-American consumers, and in a few cases — such as the magazines Ebony, Jet and Essence — they also deliver large reach.

Specific online search, web portal, aggregation and social media sites (such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and YouTube) and televised sporting events (NFL and NBA in particular) reach the largest absolute numbers of black men. For those though seeking to inlfuence the content of media, opportunities to do so in these media sources are limited—outside of paid advertising.

Among platforms that generate their own editorial or entertainment content, magazines reach the largest numbers of black men. Nine of the top 10 content-generating media sources across all platforms are magazines, and their reach to African-American men is a little over 20 million monthly. Titles include Ebony, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, Jet, National Geographic, Men’s Health, Black Enterprise, Essence, and People. Black-oriented magazines—Ebony, Jet, Essence, and Black Enterprise—alone reach about 10 million African-American men monthly. 

On TV, sports shows—especially basketball and football—dominate the television viewing habits of African-American men.  Music-oriented programs, such as the Grammy Awards, are the next most popular television shows for African-American audiences. With respect to reach to African-American men by network, the FOX Network has more black-oriented shows with a large reach to African-American men than any other major network, such as In the Flow and the NAACP Image Awards. Comedies such as TBS’s Are We There Yet? are popular with African- American men but fall behind sports and music-related content in popularity. Finally, TBS is the only mass media cable network with black-oriented shows — Tyler Perry’s The Family That Prays and Are We There Yet? — both of which have large reach to African-American men.

Online, African Americans' top preferences mirror those of the general adult population in the U.S., with Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter being among the most popular sites. Websites devoted to music or with a music componet—World Star Hip Hop, Black Voices, BET Interactive, Bossip.com, and DatPiff—dominate in popularity.

With respect to newspapers, they have a smaller reach to African Americans and African-American men in particular than any other media platform we examined, including online, radio, magazines, and TV. The Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News, and USA Today are the top mainstream newspapers with respect to reach to African Americans, who comprise on average less than 15 percent of the total readership of each paper. Black-oriented  newspapers have very limited reach to African-American men: overall, their median circulation is 30,000 compared to 386,000 for mainstream newspapers in five media markets examined in The Opportunity Agenda study (New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.

Closing with radio, African-American men listen to music-oriented stations more than any other stations, and the most popular stations tend to follow the Urban Contemporary (UC, 80s and 90s rhythm-and-blues and soul) and Urban Adult Contemporary formats (same as UC exccluding rap), except in New York City where Rhythmic Contemporary Hit Radio (electronic dance music, upbeat rhythmic, pop, hip- hop and R&B hits) is dominant. Radio news stations have a very small reach to African-American men and African-American adults overall in the media markets we investigated.

You can get the full study here, including recommendations for improving both the content and the reach of media with respect to African-American men.