Day 2: How URL Media is intentionally building its network and what’s in store for the future | Otter.ai

Day 2: How URL Media is intentionally building its network and what’s in store for the future

Joe Amditis24min

Stefanie Murray

00:06

All right, so next up, I'd like to welcome Ellah Nze to the stage to tell us more about URL media, which is one of the most innovative collaborative startups in the last few years in the United States. And so Ellah, come on up.

Ellah Nze

00:21

Thank you, Stefanie, that was super sweet of you. Appreciate it.

Ellah Nze

00:26

My name is Ellah Nze. I'm the director of operations for URL media. And super happy to be here with you all today and kick off one of the first sessions of day two, this is my first time participating in this conference.

Ellah Nze

01:20

So as I mentioned, I work for URL Media and here to just speak with you all today give you background of who we are as a company, how we've organically grown over the past few years, and also just give you a glimpse into what we have in store for the future.

Ellah Nze

01:41

Okay, so your L stands for uplift, respect and love. And we are a for profit network of black and brown community media organizations. And all of the community media outlets in our network provide trusted reliable information on their platforms. And they also have direct relationships with their audiences. So our mission as a network is to support our partners and provide them the ability to amplify and scale their work to reach more audiences have the ability to content share, and also expand the revenue streams through our shared advertising model. As a company URL is a self sustaining business. And we receive revenue through primarily three sources, grants and philanthropy, the shared advertising model, and also through our b2b Recruitment arm that specializes in bipod, candidate placement, executive coaching, professional development resources and more.

Ellah Nze

02:50

So I think it's important to just give you a little bit of background and who we are. Our co founders, Sarah Lomax and Mitra Kalita. Were recently featured in Oprah dailies, women who start thinking series. Thank you. super huge moment, were super excited for that. Discussing the founding of URL. Pretty big deal. And then do you have your role came days after the murder of George Floyd, Sara and Mitra had initially met in 2018. During the media transformation challenge, while it was still at Harvard, and in the height of the 2020, racial protests, there was an article that came out about mainstream media and issues of racism in their top ranks. And Mitra picked up the phone and called Sarah and said, we have to do something, what can we do? We're tired of saying this. This is the moment we need to be agents of change, and disrupt those power structures. And in doing so, they realized that there are so many high performing black and brown media organizations that are out there that are doing excellent work. They've been doing excellent work for decades. Yet these companies are doing this without the recognition with lack of resources, and without support. So I just want to pause and take a moment for that, because it's very powerful, right. So rather than starting a new digital media company, they have this idea that if we come together as a collective, we can have greater scale, and greater impact. And a couple of fundamental things that they had aligned on early on in the relationship is that they believed in the power of community media. They wanted to serve black and brown people, and they wanted to stop these power structures. So as a network, we were able to address these issues of scarcity and lack of representation by allowing the partners in our network to share their content, amplify each other's work. Cross platforms, and also share revenue in order to build greater sustainability for bipoc media. And by doing so this idea of coming together, they would be able to have more influence greater impact and take back the power in a sense.

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