As the longest-running African American, family-owned newspaper business in the nation, the AFRO leverages our platforms to provide readers and followers with good news about our community not otherwise found in other news outlets. Our content takes mainstream stories and presents them in a way that offers a voice and perspective from the African American lens. We utilize this influence of over 129 years to shape the political and social order of our community.
The ongoing global COVID-19 health crisis has had adverse effects on Black residents in essentially every major city and has highlighted several health disparities, especially in the city of Baltimore.
As of Aug. 23, roughly 277,857 Baltimore City residents have been fully vaccinated, according to the Baltimore City COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard. The dashboard’s latest statistics also reveal that 36.2% of Black city residents have been fully vaccinated. This is compared to 59.9% of white residents and 88.5% of Asian residents.
The National Urban League President recently shared “… when white America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia, and never has that metaphor been more apt,” Morial said. “Urban communities of color are likely to suffer the brunt of the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis and any legislative response must contain targeted relief.” Because of the above referenced statistics and the sentiments expressed by President Morial our AFRO team wanted to help educate our community.
Given our influence, strong social media following and our expertise with hosting and producing live events, the medical institution approached us to partner with them to provide a public service to our fans and followers.
During one of our brainstorming sessions, we proposed an alternative approach to sharing content to reduce vaccine hesitancy using local comedy using person-on-the-street interviews and musical talent. We designed all the promotional material, served as the hosts, identified, and managed the talent as well as coordinated all the prerecorded tapings. We combined all the content and packaged it into a broadcast that we produced and uploaded into the Stream Yard platform to appear as it was live and posted real-time comments as the medical professionals responded to live questions and concerns in the chat.
The broadcast featured pre recorded segments from medical experts and local community influencers.