Letter from the Editor: The Philly Download's winding road

To lead the Philly Download is to walk a path where dreams surround me from every direction. 

It’s impossible to discuss our future with readers, viewers, contributors, board members and our team without feeling the rich, layered hopes on what we can achieve and how people see their place in it. 

These dreams brim with possibilities— docuseries, investigations, print publications… I could go on. But before I do, it’s worth naming that sometimes our dreaming have a twinge of grief to it: Our people know the news media that we deserve, and we know that we’ve never fully had it.

Tayyib Smith, my mentor and friend, often uses the word apartheid to describe the racial politics of our region, where matters of school funding, quality of life, generational wealth, health access still can be better understood through legacies of segregation rather than the Constitution. The experiences we’ve had with news coverage and the expectations we have for the future reflect that apartheid.  

Every article that lands as stereotypical; every crime brief that minimizes the loss of precious life; all the stories that could benefit the community that get missed— We feel it. There still aren’t enough Black Philadelphians who receive opportunities to produce journalism, and the journalism we have often comes from voices who don’t really know us like that.

But we know we can do better. As Temple Professor Linn Washington has taught us, our community created the first published Black counternarrative, the first association for Black journalists, the oldest Black newspaper and the oldest continuously operating Black newspaper in the country. Our neighbors over in Wilmington claim the first Black woman publisher in North America. 

Over the last four months, the Philly Download has been diving deep into a strategic journey to reshape what this news organization will be in the future, studying history consistently along the way to see how we can a) meet the needs that communities have and b) live up the lineage we come from. 

The path forward has been a winding road. Our new brand design is a literal reflection of that. The half-rainbow loops that you see on our web pages and our refreshed logo are visual references to the old Gallery (before it became the Fashion District), but it’s also a reference to the path we’re on. Keeping Black spaces and producing Black media in Philadelphia both feel precarious right now, but even if there’s pivots in the road, we’re going to keep going.

We’re grateful that our new look comes through the attentive, careful work of designer/news developer Dain Saint of Futurefull. Before Dain put any design directions together, he gathered our core editorial team and board chair together for a five-hour somatic session to delve into what felt right for our next steps. Warmth, connection, approachability, reverence for our elders, and nostalgia (for the Gallery and other cherished landmarks) resonated heavily in the session, which led us to the design you see today. Our main font draws inspiration from L.A. Rebellion filmmakers and 70s Black literature, two movements that pressed back against retrenchment after an era of progress. 

When I first saw the way Dain put all of our visual references and conversations together, my mind traveled back in time to childhood, sitting in the living room with my dad, watching an old re-run of The Flip Wilson Show. I learned to dream of better media from my father, who would show me old shows and movies while noting how Black people were depicted along the way. The Philly Download editorial team wasn’t attempting to put together an aesthetic that felt like a Black 70s variety show, but it feels fitting that we did: In our next chapters, we’re aspiring to build a newsroom that embraces that there isn’t one way to tell a story, and that Black Philadelphians have the talent to do it all. 

Our new strategies are building blocks towards reaching the series, investigations, and publications that we know are possible. We're investing in slower, more in-depth journalism. If it's not revelatory or doesn't offer something new to our information ecosystem, we don't want to publish it.

Right now, you’re seeing some of our first attempts to implement the strategic commitments we’ve made so far. We recognize that worship of the written word is a facet of white supremacy culture, and that Black people, like all humans, tell stories beautifully through film, photo, visual art, food, podcasts and more. 

Very recently we have:

• Published our first editorial illustration in September, before ramping up our illustration program, which soared in our first-ever print publication, our Election Zine, where we also debuted our first editorial collages. 
• Contracted a contributing photo editor, Lianne Milton, who is already elevating the visual storytelling on this website and has edited two photo essays in her short time with us already.
• Expanded our work to include longform storytelling.
• Moved forward with plans to launch our first podcast in collaboration with Dave Fortune, Forget the Score, which will soon cover Philly sports while centering Black fans.
• Restructured our editorial flow to improve the caliber of the work we’re delivering.
• Rebuilt our website into home for cross-platform storytelling in a post-platform world. This means we have a vision for stories that you might find on YouTube, on social, on here, but we’re mindful of the ways that information sharing can’t be centralized these days.

We know you could be anywhere on the internet right now, but we’re glad that you’re here with us. May I ask— What’s your storytelling dream? What’s the story you’ve got that hasn’t been told? We want to hear it; we want to see it; we want to make space for it. We welcome you to pitch us  and stay tuned as the journey unfolds. 

If you would like to support us in our journey, we welcome you to donate to The Download News. Each donation helps us to fund more on-the-ground reporting, more ambitious projects, and more news where Black voices always matter.