African American
In reply to the discussion: Cornel West Surrogacy highlights a major problem with the Sanders' campaign's outreach strategy [View all]Empowerer
(3,900 posts)This interview is a perfect example of what you're talking about, Steve. It's a good one, but it's a day late and a dollar short. This should have been done months ago. While it is possible that the campaign tried to get this earlier, knowing how the media in general and the black press in particular work, I suspect that EBONY tried to get a Sanders interview and the campaign did not make him available until recently - since an interview with a presidential candidate is a "get" that EBONY surely would not have pushed off if it had been offered. Perhaps the campaign didn't fully recognize the value of EBONY magazine in the black community - many people outside of the community don't grasp the tremendous influence of EBONY and JET.
If I'm correct, this is indicative of the problem that you and I are talking about. The outreach to the black community seems to have been tailored around how the campaign insiders tend to think, not how their intended audience operates. While EBONY magazine is available online, there's a strong tradition and culture of subscribing to the print version and reading and sharing the hard copy - often for months after it originally runs. A running joke among my family concerns the stack of EBONYs and JETs on every black grandmother's coffee table and in the basket in her bathroom, that we binge read whenever we visit. And, of course, there's also the big stack in every black barbershop and beauty salon. You can't expect to reach a broad swath of the black community by simply doing an interview that shows up on EBONY.com a couple of months before the primary.