Black Ballad

Frustrated with the lack of representation of Black women in the pages of publications and the lack of Black journalists in the newsrooms, the journalist Tobi Oredein founded a media publication putting Black women first, where they tell their stories on their terms. She launched Black Ballad along with Bola Awoniyi in 2014 as a free website.

In 2016, aiming to create a sustainable business model to pay their writers and run the media outlet, the organisation launched its membership model, facing people's scepticism who said that Black women would never buy into a membership. However, they pre-sold over 300 memberships.

In 2021, the organisation launched an equity crowdfunding and raised over £335,000, with over £200,000 coming from over 1,300 Black female investors.

Black Ballad's members pay a monthly or annual fee to obtain full access to the content produced, discounts to events, and deals to Black-owned brands partnering with Black Ballad.

Site users are allowed up to three articles per month before they are encouraged to become subscribers.

Black Ballad now has thousands of members and tens of thousands of email subscribers. Its members are 25 to 45-year-old British Black professional women.

One of Black Ballad's projects was an editorial campaign about Black motherhood in 2020. Black Ballad used informal feedback from its Slack group to design a survey on the topic and distributed it to more than 2,000 women. The team used the results to guide editorial coverage and a conversation around Black motherhood, securing a paid partnership with HuffPost UK and bringing this conversation into the mainstream media.

The organisation wants to avoid mainstream media's mistakes, such as assuming women are all the same, and aims to express the diversity of Black women's voices.

The information in this media profile was collected through desk research. Last updated: February 2023

Last updated date: April 2023