valuable to have this discussion. i always had a little bit of a fear that writers will start thinking too much about marketing because when you are writing, talking literature here, publishing and novel, narrative nonfiction, when you are at your desk working and being inspired there is a lot of time, a lot of places to keep marketing concerns out of your mind and make the best possible piece of art that you can make. if you succeed with that, you can find a great publishers. is true that authors often have to hustle constantly. on the other hand i as a publishers feel if we love the book and believe in a book, it is our job to figure out how to sell it. it is the esthetics and this is one of the things i am proud of.

we publish 250 books now and we have grown a lot more savvy with our marketing. we are ultimately esthetically driven. we're looking for great books. the marketing concerns are smaller than artistic concerns in terms of the general acquisition process. that is another thing -- i cannot think the work we publishers speaks for itself. there's a really great work of art the personal between a smart author and smart publishing company, you will figure out what the readers want. >> i am going to jump in and apologize. we have to wind up the panel right here. i did ask that last question. if we get more one response, i think not. thanks for coming out. let's give a big round of applause for our distinguished panel. thank you for coming out.

>> is there a nonfiction offer or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. now booktv's coverage of the 2012 national black writers conference concludes with a panel discussion titled the role of social media. black writers take literature to the web. panelists include angela dodson, content manager and "kweli journal". troy johnson of the african-american literature book club. montague kobbe, writer and blogger. akoto ofori-atta, assistant editor at "the root". laura pegram, founding editor of "kweli journal" and joel dreyfuss, senior editor at large of "the root". this panel is an hour-and-a-half. >> thank you. at the sunday, everybody.

wow. we are going to change that. i want to say special thank you to dr. brenda greene who has the remarkable job organizing this production. they have done the job of heroes. wherever you are in the audience thank you for putting this together. we are going to spend the next hour or so looking at how a committee of writers and publishers and journalists are using social media to amplify the voices and the work of black writers. what is really great about this group assembled here on stage is the each handle social media from different platforms of information we have. we have academics, newsroom editors, magazine founders and book marketers. i have been having some e-mail conversations prior to today. what they have been saying is

quite interesting. i will put floyd on the spot. for johnson e-mail me and said he is convinced social media will not do us any good in the long term. it might be doing us more harm so we are going to get to that in a second. montagu -- montague kobbe who works out of the caribbean looks at the global impact of social me and sees the way the technology is phasing struggling publication. he calls these strategies cheap, pragmatic and global. i am going to read some very small bios. please forgive me. i have reduced their very accomplished biography to two lines. angela dodson -- angela dodson

is the manager of "kweli journal". she has warned the editor capture notable publications like black issues book review and the new york times. welcome. trey johnson is an industry leader in marketing books on the web. he is the founder of el al b.c..com, the african-american literature book club which is the largest and most frequently visited web site dedicated to books and films by and about people of african descent. troy having known a little bit about starting websites, i know that accomplishment -- thank you for that. laura pegram is the founding editor of "kweli journal" by and for writers of color. she has serve as an instructor at the frederick douglass creative arts center where she started two workshops in the art

of short-story and the arch of red ink for children. welcome. joel dreyfuss is editor at large of "the root" which as many of you know is the leading online source of news and commentary about african-american perspective. joe has been editor-in-chief of information week, and executive editor of black enterprise and earlier shared with me that he lives and works out of paris. we are very jealous of that. akoto ofori-atta is assistant editor of "the root". she has a position at mcgraw-hill co. and communications and business and marking it associate for business week magazine. welcome.

and montague kobbe is a writer in madrid and he has written for the indian newspaper and work for the daily herald. let's welcome our panelists. [applause] i want to be a troublemaker and start with foil johnson who was a troublemaker himself. so you wrote to me and i will repeat for the audience that you're convinced that social media will not do us any good in the long term. in fact it might be doing us some harm. pretty bold and controversial. tel as a little about that and i hope our panelists will weigh in as well. >> i will write that and stick to it. i was prepared to say i am not convinced because no one actually knows what the long-term impact of social media will be in the context of

promoting marketing riders disease i am most keenly interested in promoting the work of our riders. but after being involved in social media the behavior of people who use social media fuss--the behavior of people doesn't seem to support writers. particularly the consumption of deep content, quince the content. the behavior of people who visit my fan page. i could have a great article posted on my web site and i could get a lot of people to

click and like the article but most never actually click the link. i measure all this stuff. i look at how many people actually clicked on links i put on twitter. i engage people. over the years i am not seeing a return on investment when i compare that to the amount of time i spent. i am fairly certain on a more sophisticated user than most users, i spend most of my time promoting writers and that is what i see. i do know for example that my traditional newsletter does a lot more in engaging and promoting the work of writers. old-time discussion boards were much more of a rich environment for exchanging ideas. i am not so sure you can

exchange anything of meaning in 400 characters. that is what it is coming down to. there are great benefits of social media. connecting with people i haven't seen in 30 years and things like that but in terms of the actual marketing of writing, just not convinced yet. perhaps someone on the panel will show me otherwise. >> i will take a chance. as former managing editor of "the root," we published long form story articles, essays leaders the magazine length articles. some have run -- the longest peace that i ran ran 4500 words and was read by several thousand

people. so that i think there is a market for a long form on the web. it has to be good. it has to be -- it has to be written in a way that works on the web because there are differences between writing on the web and in regular print. we grew the audience over the last few years have "the root". it is double what it was three years ago. the average audience about two million people beat "the root" a month. there's a market for what i think is good writing and good journalism and good essays. i am not sure about fiction. i don't know if you want to read fiction online at least on a web site. i think they do on the books -- evokes --e-books. when i started publishing in journalism we had carbon paper

and typewriters. then we went to computers and all this stuff and i think some people confuse -- they think they're in a dead tree business. if it is not in print and not on paper it is not valid. i think we have to embrace the a electronic version. we are committing ideas. and visions and world views. with the internet has done is created almost free distribution. if you think about what publishers used to do, they use to read your book, they had copyeditor's in the old days and people who edited your book and made it better. there's not a lot of that now. wants they did the book they had to print it and find it and distribute it by truck and it cost a lot of money so theoretically i am very excited about this because by

eliminating distribution costs there's a great opportunity for many more riders to be heard. is much less expensive to publish. you can publish on line. you can self publishers. there was an article in the new york times about all these teenagers who are publishing books, self publishing with parents's help. i was looking at the cost of a couple thousand dollars to publish a book. maybe 500 copies of the book. people are making money back from selling to their friends. in response to the marketing issue i think the big issue is targeting. finding the right people for a particular product. we are overwhelmed by e-mail and twitter and everything else that bombards you daily. i get several hundred e-mails the day most of which i don't want. how do you focus on an audience? the other issue is not just on

your web site but how do you get it to other web sites where there are people of white interests? that is a big challenge for us in communities of color to identify these places where you are most likely to have impact. i am optimistic about social media. >> i agree with joel dreyfuss and we can have meaningful conversations in short messages. is not just one week is the entire conversation. what happens when you have people participate is you have these ideas to express thoughts and ideas and collective statements and photos that carry a story and allow you to get more meaningful content. the other things social media has done, is the just to the new way that media is being consumed. i am sorry.

the other things social media allows us to do is adjust to the way media is being consumed. even though long form pieces might not always work on the web there's a way to adapt it so people can consume it and that is something we have been successful doing at "the root". ..

when i was writing black publishers book review and it allows you to have a daily communion with the whole community of people involved, in my case in literature and journalism, that people have lost contact with, people i never knew about come back into your life. you can discuss books in debt and certainly more books are getting sold as people like terry mcmillan are on line every day and sean tate billingsley, victoria christopher murray. they are all out their daily talking to each other and talking to a wider audience that may not be aware of them. one of the ways that i think you can make it more useful is that you have to be selective in who you accept as your friend and monitor who your followers are so that you are targeting the

community of literature and that is what you want. in my case i kind of have dual careers because i'm not strictly a writer. i am mostly a journalist and i've spent a lot of years among journalists and a lot of people that pop up on my screen every day. also i am writing about important things and social media for me becomes almost my daily news read that i can skim half the things going on in the world and know what's important to black people in the world today and what of the great writers are thinking and the great journalists. may be that i can read, read through my twitter feed every day and keep up-to-date up to date on what other people are reading, what other people are writing and what great thinkers are thinking. i think that's very important. >> will you can look at social media from a global perspective and you see it as a tool to arrange geographical distance.

>> yes i am do but i wanted to talk about something that joel was saying about communicating and i think when you're talking about social media, you will soon no longer be talking about reading, but you will be communicating in different ways. visually and through all kinds of support that will not necessarily mean you have to get to an article of 4500 words and read them. you will still get the information or the message without necessarily reading. i think social media is not necessarily going to be the way that people will read in the future but they will continue to communicate through that. and yet, that i think links directly with what joel is

mentioning now in terms of the global reach of a social media. angela was just mentioning, when you have a whole array of writers, people from the establishment who are directly there for you to speak to them, people that you would normally, it would be absolutely impossible for you to speak with these people, not impossible but it would have been much much harder 10 years ago, that is not only in terms of people and how busy they might be and what kinds of things they may do but also if you are working like i do in the caribbean were traveling from one island to the other is expensive, it's time-consuming and it's complicated and all of a sudden you can't communicate with your editors, your collaborators, with your writers instantly, just like that. i can do that with the people that i work with from madrid as

well as from anguilla overlooking the sea seas. it doesn't make a difference. it takes your office to wherever you are and i think troy that really helps. i think that's a very positive aspect. >> we will turn to you for a moment. something pretty marketable starting your own on line journal and how many years have you been doing it? >> we launched our first issue in december of 2009. >> built it from scratch so talk about what it's been like for you and how social media is helping you. >> it's been a process. we use social media to help create the buzz around authors that we publish most of whom are emerging authors and we also use social media to help elder leadership. i think that one of the main

struggles has been trying to be more dedicated to treating on a regular basis. i know that it's the just did that two to three tweets per day would be most beneficial if you are really trying to create that community, but i don't always hit that mark. i have to be honest, so i try to do what i can but i found that the more time i spend with social media, whether that be twitter or facebook, the more benefits i receive so we have more writers who are submitting or responding to our calls for submission. we also have more authors who are -- directly to kweli journal. sometimes it's just to say keep up the good work and be like

what you are doing and other times it's to ask whether or not they can actually submit a piece to the journal outside of the cause. we also use social media to target and to partner with on line communities. there is an on line bookstore, lacoste a -- which will actually be opening up if physical space this spring so we are partnering with them to plan a many literary conference in july, so we try to use the tools that we have available to outreach and to spread the word. >> i want to move onto using social media responsibly and however we want to define using social media responsibly. any of you might have seen the twitter war that erupted this past weekend and it is kind of exaggerated to say but between the african-american culture

writer and piers morgan over the trayvon martin case. so it got to the point on twitter that these two men attacked each other's journalistic integrity. so let's talk about that. let's talk about -- angela you mentioned the case of trayvon martin a few months ago. so let's define that first of all. what it means for our community of writers and publishers and bloggers to use social media responsibly and how do we do that and how do we avoid the pitfalls? >> i like to think of social media and the reason why we use social media as the 3r's of social media. won his reputation, relationships and research end of phase one of the most important his reputation, certainly for writers promoting their book. we have seen in the last several months a couple of people make

very very grave misjudgment not necessarily mistakes, bad and the case of roland martin and his remarks whether you think they were or not were taken to be so and he was suspended for a month. here is a brother who could have been on the verge of possibly getting his own show probably still is, since they have now put them back on the air but he could have blown that. he is a journalist but he also has been an author and the same thing charles pelot of "the new york times" made similar comments. we have seen stories that people are judging whether you should get a scholarship in looking at your facebook page. and in the last workshop i was and they were talking about book proposals that publishers are looking at for facebook page. not only to see how many followers you have but then that potentially gives them also reason to mix your proposal.

and, we have seen other disasters with bullying on line. i cover a lot of things and diverse issues in higher education and we have done a couple of things around the case of tyler clementi who of course killed himself because his roommate videotaped him and put it on line. and you know, there is the potential for good and there's a potential for evil. there is the potential for really enhancing your career by being on social media and there is a chance that you can basically ditch the whole thing and 30 seconds worth of ms. thought, misspeaking on line. >> and in reality angela, actually making my point about social media, before i ask about this specific issue i want to address some of the other comments he made.

so for example, the ability to communicate with people globally very easily did not happen as a result of social media. that was possible when i first got on line and had an e-mail address in the early 80s. social media didn't actually make that possible and in fact one could argue that social media is making communication more difficult because of the scenarios we see, people misunderstanding what is communicated with 140 characters. people reacting in a hyper, you know, in the over exaggerated way to what is being published, people using your facebook wall which is really a personal space to make hiring decisions. that is the lower extreme and to speak to the point that joe raised, i ends to agree 100% with what you said about the internet.

i think the internet is one of the greatest things that is, our way ever and i too publish very long articles. you said 4500. i have publish something that is 3000 words. that is really meaty and most people would say you need to web a fire that. you need to shorten it, spend it across multiple pages so you get more page views embedded with ads. i think that is the kind of thing that is putting downward pressure on that type of content and the sense of who and how many people actually consume it so for example if i wanted to make my site infinitely more possible i know exactly what to do, but i am more mission driven so i don't do certain things. now, i will give you an example. i wrote an article recently about the closings of hundreds of independently owned, over 100 independent bookstores. actually what i did was create a

database of bookstores, independent bookstores. you go on line and you can search by state. you will get a map of the store, a photograph of the store, author social media links and contacts and store hours you name it. i said to myself, you know what? in doing the research i discovered there were over 100 stores that close so instead of spending the article, creates on line database, and said i said do you know what, i know more people will be more interested in this and in fact it's important to say all of the stores closed and because i said you know the death of black bookstores, got a lot of attention. so what is popular on social media and what is talked about in the media is typically skewed and slanted negatively, scandalous. if you're spike lee and you tweak you know, zimmerman's

address, the whole planet is talking about it. if you are terry mcmillan and you google her, you are going to her tweet talking about this and this is their kids, literally. you want get the web sites talking about all of her work. so when i talk about this i'm actually looking at the hay fears, data, traffic. i love the internet. it's been -- i've been building web sites for over 15 years. kob c..com is my livelihood but i'm not convinced that social media is helping. in terms of that, i think it's ridiculous that he could be suspended for something, maybe it was a silly statement but the fact that he could lose, potentially lose his job, his career over an offhand comment? that is ridiculous. i mean, really. [applause] >> in terms of common terms of

using social media responsibly i think that the main lesson is one that is not often explicit because social media feels so casual and so friendly but the reality is that the conversations you have around news are now in news, so when you go to to eat. to re-tweeted. to post a comment, go to do anything you are either intentionally or unintentionally starting a conversation with you intended to or not, whether you pose a question or not. you are leaving room to start a conversation so where journalists have to be conscious is in that when you are sending these messages you have to think about, is this something that, is their news value in this? is there something i have to defend in this? is there something i'm going to potentially offend somebody with? these are spring so we should be very conscious of despite the fact that social media feels so casual in a way.

>> i wanted to make the distinction. i was talking about this with angela last night. sometimes we get so involved in social media, because it's fun and you might like it and there are people there that you haven't seen in a long time that you really like and it feels as you say, casual. it feels almost as if it's private, as if it's virtually you were at home talking to some of your friends. but it really is public. most of the time it's public, so you are actually speaking to the world, whether they here are not is not important. if they want to hear it, if you say the wrong thing they will hear, so you are shouting out loud. angela said, it's much worse. you shout out loud and nobody listens but it's there, it stays there. you have to be careful because you are actually not just talking in private with a few friends or with the people that

you are intending, if that, and is addressed to someone who has background information of what you are saying they will understand what you mean that the other people won't understand what you mean. they will just understand what is there in 140 characters or facebook or whatever and that can be misconstrued and you have to be very careful about it because it is public. >> i just think exactly what he says, think the danger of social media is the sense of intimacy that you consider with your phone and you can tweet out 140 characters or on facebook and not realize that you are -- it's a loudspeaker and it's not like elbowing your buddies and saying, that guy is wearing pink or whatever. somebody should whip him as roland said. you are telling the world. you were standing in the huge auditorium and if somebody re-tweets what you tweet and

they have a million followers at as they think was what happened to some of roland's comments, then it's a very public statement of what you stand for which is the danger of the. >> why are we not more keenly aware of that, the line between public and private is very blurred. why are we still making these -- >> i think it's because it's new and we have never had the kind of audience we have had before. most of us have never had as many people having access to what we say or write or think, unless we wrote bestsellers. i probably have something like 3000 facebook contacts because of the work i was doing in the last few years and anything i say, i am sure most of the 3000 are not reading it but you know if they read it and some of them republish it as facebook, if you are on somebody's brands list and it goes into their news feed and so on and so on.

i think that is the thing. we have to make adjustments as you say to the difference between public and private and aligned is further and further blurred. e-mail as troy was mentioning, ebell is -- e-mail is very private. you send an e-mail to one person or group of people and you know who is reading it. tweeting is completely different thing. it's riding on the graffiti on the wall and that is the danger. >> i think we are also using it in both senses. we are also being public and being private at the same time. i have a friend who was not a writer, he is a market tour. he has his own agency and he realized he was actually hurting his agency through tweeting things that he -- that weren't terribly insensitive but they were meant to involve a few friends. he tweeted a couple of things and it was bad so he opened

another account. it's a fake name, his account and it's private and he only has 25 friends and that is what he uses in private but most people don't do that. >> that is what i was going to say. some writers are developing two personas on line, the fan page in their personal page but i think most of us started using it thinking, i will keep in contact with my kids and now i know where all of my high school class from 40 years ago is, but we tend to say things on facebook that may be about our personal lives that do not enhance our careers at all. they may not be as dangerous as the situation with roland or charles blow because they have very public jobs, but it could be that it's just not serving your purpose in life if that is to sell books or get people to follow you. i followed a woman in my community for some time who it

seemed to me every time she went on line, she was complaining that she was ill, her kids were ill and was taking too much time to pick them up from school and almost never about the job she had, which was to promote a certain segment of the economy in our community. i see a lot of authors doing the same thing. they are telling you what they had for dinner or whatever, what the baby did but they are not telling you look, i have a book signing tomorrow, i have got 50 copies of my book. the day after that i will be at x place in the beginning of my next novel is this particular passage or something. anyway that they can get people to engage with them as an actual author and for journalists it's even more dangerous because you have a public job and a public trust to be fair or objective or

whatever and if you are on twitter at the super bowl party talking smack, and baby have a beer or something, the potential for slipping is really really great. speech rorie? >> troy? >> that brings us to a discussion of randy because if you are an author and have a brand or if you are representing a company you have a brand. you have to be very careful about the language you use because you are speaking for this brand. i think with kweli i have a facebook fan page and then i have a personal facebook page and i use both of them for dodson's development to build leadership, to build an audience. the same thing applies with twitter. i know that it's recommended you should also show your personality when you tweet. i don't have a personality when i tweet. i essentially just talk about

kweli and occasionally animate say something that has some degree of humor to it but i am very very conscious of the brand of kweli because i want to protect it. >> i just want to hop on and make two points. if you come away with anything, do with the average teenager does, have a personal and public profile on facebook. in other words, have your facebook profile, blocked, blocked down and only people who are actually her friends have access to it. then you can have another one that is public and says all the good stuff. so businesses, individuals should have two separate profiles. the other point, oh, the commercialization of social media is one of the other things that is dragging it down. i could be wrong, but i don't think that the people who put -- create a social media, they are

not centers of commerce where people are bombarding you with ads and buy this and sneakers and how to lose weight, belly fat and all this stuff that is out there that is clouding it up and making it a really difficult place to navigate and really getting anything of any benefit. what most people are doing from my observation as authors, they will set up a group. everybody that is their friend, and facebook lets you do that without permission and then they start pushing commercials on you. everybody who is in a group, they start publishing commercials also. so you have all these groups with nothing but commercials and no one engaging each other. that is the most of it. in other places you have people who actually interact with each other and do meaningful work that is them in -- the minority and that is not unique to the

social network. the difference however is that facebook and all of these platforms are getting all the traffic, all of the data. they own your content. you don't, so a big mistake that authors make is make in their facebook while their web site. you can do that but there are easier ways to create web sites. wordpress makes it very simple to make a web site and there are many others. you can create a web site for free. the barriers of entry have been eliminated a long time ago but what we are doing is giving our content to facebook for free, not only for free, they are making money off of it and not giving anything in return. except for perhaps a lot of spam. i can go deeper. there are companies who have automated bots that generate

tweets. its individual. if you know an individual that has 10,000 friends who is not a celebrity, you are utilizing some software to build up your fan base, so i just came out and said if you have 10,000 twitter followers that will help establish the fact that you have a platform. i know software that will get you 10,000 followers. it's not a big deal. but it's how we use it and how it's not good. i just don't know what else to say, sorry. >> i'm just going going to offer a counterargument. yet we live in a culture where our audience is invested in personalities. they want personal information. they want to feel connected to writers and the public figures. melissa harris-perry is waiting about her family often, so how do we find a balance between tweeting about facebooking and

tumbler, using social media to talk about your public work but also gaining an audience and having them being invested on a personal level because as we have been told, that is needed, that is required. >> again, i think you have to be very careful. you have to think about things before you say them. maybe you do want to let them in a little bit. i know when we were working with black issues oak review, god rest its soul, one of the things we were told constantly was that particularly for black readers we engage with authors and writers in a much different way than other audiences. basically we won't buy of book until you come to my mama's book club and talk it up and then mama tells me to buy it. it's a process that takes longer than it does for white folks to get published because it's thirdhand.

by that time most of our books have been taken off of the active sale. by the same token in the same way we needed before social media to see you talk and no youth, especially in social media, we need to do that. people need to know perhaps that you have four children. they don't need to know every time they have a special. they need to know maybe that you cook but they don't need to know what the menu was every night. that makes them think, when did she write? and it's just a missed opportunity. if you have 15 minutes to spend on social media, spend it saying something important. >> i want to go back to a point but troy made. when i think about the many hours that the route root within talking to our audience, all of our books have been organic. all of our growth on line has

been organic and i have had a very different experience with social media ventura may have. i follow writers who started out with maybe 500 followers in three years later they have 5000 followers or 4000 or whatever and made this is very slow and incremental growth. what that means is overtime they are sharing content with people who are interested in sharing their content and in their audience grows and that is the same thing is happening with "the root" and happening with several different black journalists personalities and publications. i don't necessarily think that it's all some sort of weird system where nothing is authentic. at "the root" we have learned they want to hear from us all the time, every single day, 24 hours a day so that is how a post and that is how we communicate with them. if that wasn't working, we would see people starting to leave our site but that is not what is happening at all. as our audience grows so do our engagement numbers and that is

very telling of how people consume news. >> let me please be perfectly clear. i am on every single social media platform ever invented. i use it for my business in a positive way. i'm not just talking about aalbc.com. i have i don't know how many facebook fans and a heck of a lot of twitter followers and i have a large e-newsletter, subscriber base. it's not that i'm not -- i am using it in a positive fashion. what i do question however is a much broader social media and its impact on writing and how we consume news. you said earlier that if you make an offhanded tweet, that becomes news and that is true. and i stress this that it's

unfortunate but it's the reality. i do use it. i do like it. i block all games but at any rate i do use social media but i'm not talking about aalbc. and the other point is, i'm not yet convinced the amount of time i invest in social media is more beneficial than the time that i spend using more traditional older technologies. the jury is still out on that. but i do use social media i think effectively. i just don't think that we are moving in a more positive direction and general. if that clarifies my position a little better. >> i think that the problem we have and troy at think you are a reluctant businessman in a way, that you use this media and you are using it well but at the same time you are worried about

the ads. you are worried about putting too many commercials. for most of us to survive as a business we have to find a way to sustain it and if it's breaking a story into four pages and putting some ads on it, i don't have any problem with that. their options usually on the site where you can make a single page if you want to and i know there is a drop-off. not everybody is going to read all four pages of the story. it's like a newspaper. we learned that in newspapers, if you have it jump from a front page to somewhere else you have lost a percentage of your audience and the "l.a. times" used to jump story several times in the old days when they had lots of pages. each page jump reduce the number of readers so i think there are some things we have to grit our teeth and just do because we need commercial support for what we do. we need advertisers. we need more eyeballs in one of the ways is if you break a story into four pages and you get four

page views instead of one, it impresses advertisers because they are mostly looking at page views. i think there are other ways. media is not just numbers. media is the quality of the audience and the engagement of your audience. one of the things that akoto was talking about is you can let your face but page and find out how many of your readers are involved in the discussion. the other thing we found was that discussions, there is a higher level of discussion on facebook ban on the commentary pages of "the root." on the commentary pages we get all the racists and the crazies and we spend a lot of time -- though we spent a lot of time -- i'm still attached to it. we spent a lot of time basically editing or getting rid of the crazy comments because they are anonymous. people can sign up with funny names but on facebook we found the discussions are much more

substantive and we have focused a lot more of our effort in generating discussion on facebook rather than on the pages of "the root" it's self. >> we are going to move into our q&a session shortly, but i wanted to ask and start off with you joel because as a founding member of the national association of black journalist, you see it a lot i am sure. so part of the description of this panel today stated that social media techniques have leveled the playing field and that helps to make the writing and publishing of books more accessible for all writers. i am not so convinced of that, and i want you all to weigh in starting with you joel. is the true and what exactly does that mean for us that we are leveling the playing field? >> i think you have to go back and let what has happened to publishing because i think most of us who thought of becoming it becoming writers came with the idea of that hardcover book, you know, that is in the bookstores

and the truth is publishing is a disaster area today. they have conglomerated most of the publishers. most publishers focus on mass market products meaning white author products and a handful of well-known writers. it's very hard for a new writer to breakthroughs so the reality is the old india is much more difficult for us than it was say in the 70s when just about any black writer could get published. now maybe for good reason publishers are more select this but i think at the same time it's what i was talking about with all this new technology. i think it's still in the formative stage. you have to think about the internet is only about 30 years old and i remember when they internet was non-kurd -- noncommercial and there was a huge debate about whether or not they would run ads. as i said before there is free distribution of content which means theoretically the books,

magazines, ideas and so forth are essentially free to distribute. there is still a cost in creating it and and it costs in marketing it and i think the issue that troy and others raised is, is the marketing really effective using this new technology. on the one hand it's easier to get published but it's harder to get hurt or get red. i think that is the challenge we have now. cb montague you touched on the difference between being heard and read. >> yes, and what joel is saying resonates with what i had in mind as well before. it is not leveling the field in terms of writing or getting published. you can always write and now you can perhaps publish it a little bit cheaper, self-publish it a little bit cheaper than before but the question about building an audience which we mentioned

earlier, yes perhaps the distribution costs are now well, almost nonexistent through the internet but you can distribute whatever you want and if nobody wants to pick it up, then it's useless and i think that is where troy is sort of angling, what he is talking about. i do think that you can sort of build your audience, but of course it's going to be difficult. and that is where the real challenge comes in. in facing that challenge and the use of the new technologies, we are going to see in the future much more material that is not simply an e-book. it's not going to be it digital text. it's not going to be at pdf that you can read on a tablet, what gets created. i think it's going to be much more interactive through social

media or instance. i think everything that will be created won't be interactive that there will be much more interactive material being created among loads of people who perhaps don't know each other but have a similar profile and there they -- therefore they get involved in a group. i'm absolutely convinced that you will have material that is not only attacks but that is supported by, perhaps if you have a traditional novel, then the dialogs will be spoken to you or you will have the option for that to be spoken to you or her have to canter format while you were reading it and other people can access what you have done. i don't know, it's going a little bit into the future so i don't really know how it's going to work but i am pretty sure that it's not going to stay in the traditional sort of text that we are reading on the page and now we are reading on the tablet.

>> i want to emphasize one other thing. most of the participants on line are consumers. they are not actually people who are publishing. and i agree that the barriers to entry have been lowered and indeed they have been and i also agree that it's harder to be heard because there are so many people publishing, but for the vast majority of readers, the great difficulty is sorting through all the stuff that has been written. everybody and their mother has a book out. there is no easy way for readers to figure out which book is worth reading. you can go on -- amazon is a social media. you can read the reviews there but he could as they are written by authors and pals, they are-the book. we are losing independent voices. we are losing platforms where people are expressing stuff in a way that has been vetted, that is curated.

it's not just every man and his dog out there. you know, it's something substantive. the reader is in a real quandary now. who do you read, how do you discover everybody coming at you? everybody is saying the same thing, they are the greatest but where are the critics, the respected critics whose voices that we can listen to and make good decisions? that is what is changing. we are losing newspapers, not gaining them. we are losing coverage of looks and critical reviews and the few remaining papers that survive. while there might be a handful of sites, located aalbc. when i first started 10 years ago there were more sites like mine than there are today even though it's easier to create a web site. it is absurd that some guy, me,

in his office can have the biggest web site in the space. it's very very frustrating because there is so much that needs to be done that is not getting done, and social media is not helping that despite the good works of everyone that everyone on this panel is doing. it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that is out there. >> are we leveling the playing field? your work is particularly about amplifying the books of emerging writers of color. >> at kweli we take pride in the fact that we know writers around the world. we offer tuition scholarships for writers and currently we are working with artists who were in nigeria and india as well as in this country so here at home. we want to feel as if there is some, there is some optimism

that we can hold onto and that the book will not fade away and high-quality work can still be celebrated and embraced. so, kweli is determined to kind of hang in there and keep fighting that fight. we found that the writers that come to us say that they are happy kweli exist and they have been waiting for a journal like this to kind of fill that void. it's a lot of work. takes a lot of effort but we are willing to keep moving forward. >> the exposure is very important to matt. we had a writer not too long ago that we accepted her story and then she had questions that she was concerned whether that would hurt her in getting an agent and being able to publish that particular story is part of it and while she was working on it.

somehow within a week she got an agent that had seen it or we introduced her to. so what we are doing is getting people who didn't have any chance probably is being published someplace, not -- at least not in the near future -- that gives them a credential and they can take that credential elsewhere or is it just gives them a platform in which they can be seen. at the other thing i wanted to follow on what laura said, all the stuff about there being so much out there and so many authors, it goes back to the importance of branding and of controlling your brand when you are on line. what you say about yourself and what you say about your books and what other people are saying about your books. >> kodak? >> i just wanted to touch briefly on what choice the. actually i disagree about the quandary that the reader is then. what i see is readers making conscious decisions about who they want to hear from the most.

those of us on the facebook pages, we minimize those who want to hear from less and maximize people we want to hear from more. i think that everything we do in the social media side is really sort of reactionary to what the public really wants and that is they want to be curators with content. they know who they want to hear from. they know what they want to read and from there they make very educated decisions about what they receive. >> okay, so we are going to open up the floor to questions from the audience so please come to the mic to the left in her right in the meantime i will let you know our panel has practiced what they preach. they have been tweedy and facebooking appear as we have been talking to them, very responsibly. with no panelist bashing going on i am sure.

>> first of all, good afternoon. my name is gloria wilson. i am a journalist, a black journalist, a black writer, a blogger, a speaker. i'm not on facebook deliberately, because what iac -- i have my masters in sociology and what i see is that as a culture, we have a tendency to accept whole soul would anybody gives us without really examining what it is doing to us and there's a saying that too much of a good thing can be pretty dangerous if you don't know what you are getting into. and that's what happened with my friend and journalistsjournalist, fellow journalist, he tweeted something and innocently that we would have just chuckled at and they try to castigate him for it. we are casting judgments on each other all the time over at ds

because we have not defined that social media for ourselves, so we are letting it run amok among us. we are our ready at the deficit in terms of power stuff gets published and distributed and now we are letting it is this rate what we have already bill. what i'm saying is -- my brother here and i heard last summer when you are at the harlem book fair, we need to really make some conscious decisions regardless of what is happening in the web is fair as far as how we are going to do the media and not how the media's going to do us. we are talking about the social media and whose culture is that impacting? it's impacting us. i was very emphatic about eating a black journalist because when i write, i write from the standpoint of what it means to us. i don't give a cookie with a journalistic styles and rules arctic is everybody else's rules have been against us so if you

put me on facebook they would be after me in a heartbeat. the bottom line is -- [applause] the bottom line is, i've made a conscious decision when i found out how viral lies can go and liza been told about us before for years. if we don't control what's going on, what the heck good is it? so all the stuff that we are learning, somebody needs to give us a template that we give each other and our kids so that when you do tweet you say, and these are your references and no it cannot be done in 185 characters. and yes at "the new york times" has not shortened his articles, why should we? and guess what? they don't. that is all i've got to say but i appreciate the panel. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> would anyone like to weigh in or respond? >> i will and you are not alone

in the set this set of people who have opted out of facebook my experience with, for example i noticed that you can utilize a facebook comment template. basically a post on facebook, you posted on your web site and it automatically, it's basically a facebook template that you post on your discussion web webe and it allows people to comment. but i ripped that out and replace it with something called discus which allows you to do the same thing. what i've discovered is the engagement was more. over time i realized that people -- some people simply do not like facebook. i would argue potentially for good reason but there are some people who have made a conscious decision not to utilize the social media platform. further, my customer, while sell ads for the web site, my actual

customer our readers and readers are telling me from day one, when i first started the web site was, great web site, didn't know there were so many books been written by black writers, carry on. today the problem is there are so many writers, i don't know what to read. that is the biggest complaint from readers. sure, people know the celebrities and celebrities get the most attention. you know we are looking at all the children's books and you have to be a celebrity to write a children's park. you have to be a celebrity to get any type of promotion out of publishers. in our space, more so than any other, all of the negative action that one might associate with social media impact us more. so i wish i could quote what you said but in spirit what was said by the speaker was that it is eviscerating our platforms, so

when i say, and i'm not exaggerating, we are losing web sites. we are. it's discouraging because it's too competitive and market. the remaining presence are being congealed into a handful of large, often multinational corporations that really don't have our interests at heart. when i look at the trajectory of black voices and what it's become and who owns it and the type of content that is up there and how the writers are being paid, you know i give you an anecdote. there was her rights are -- whenever someone comes to me and says i write for, and their places in "the huffington post." i say wow how is that experience in how much are you being paid? oh less than nothing. i'm not getting every -- make any money. i'm not surprised by the response. if you have something you want

to publish, i will give you $25 to publish an article. he said you know what? sure, you can publish it because i don't know when they are going to publish it and he is making a little bit of money. i give them some content. is an experiment so i publish the article. two weeks later "the huffington post" publish it. if you do a google search on the audio "huff post" is cleaning my clock. i paid for the article and publish it in advance. that is not so much a problem. the real problem is there are other web sites, wn.com and many others to spread half and impose content. my article that i paid for and i don't take copyright from authors, but they are copying a snippet of text from "huff post" and putting it on their web site, underling at with a boatload of ads and they are beating me. not only are they beating me, there are 10 other ones just like it. so if i'm the dominant player of

black books on line and this is happening with me, so i'm looking at what is happening with these other web sites that were doing great things? no one has heard of them. name five big black web sites that are promoting books that aren't stores. you no wheeze to have, you know you are doing great things but your challenge is -- did i mispronounce it? your challenge is to develop an audience. i have been there 15 years and it's still a challenge for me to maintain and grow. somebody that is just starting out, god bless you. it's not going to be easy. so my experience on line, i know is going to be different. i just know i can reach my audience. if i send a newsletter albert 17,000 people who have subscribed to it.

it's very challenging. it's preventing new entrants and its eviscerating, to use your word, our independent voices. >> clearly i think you need to hire chore it immediately. [laughter] montague did you want to weigh in on that? >> i don't want to take too much time from the questions but i want to say actually i think, i agree with you but i see it as possibly a positive thing. there are too many writers and there's so much being said that there are so many platforms in which people can get information that is like a good problem rather than a bad problem. that is, if there is excess of information yes it's going to be problematic to get to the part of the information that you want but it's there. it would be a lot worse if it weren't there and example i want to put is through the caribbean,

the caribbean who i work with on a daily basis. the best literary journal in the caribbean was the caribbean review of books. it died. distribution was impossible in the caribbean and of course after three or four years, it couldn't continue. and they decided, they had decided initially that they would not go on line because they didn't like the idea because they didn't think people would read non-articles about caribbean books, that they wouldn't be interested enough and they would have to change the way that they looked at things that were very academic and they did not want to do that. in the end they went on line and to date excess. it is moderately successful but it maintains the same standard and it has just gone digital. like the caribbean review of

books, talk about big corporations. bbc has just stopped the bbc caribbean section after 40, 50 some years, 60 years. so what has emerged from that is the serious blogs that did exist already at that have become more prominent. jeffrey felp who has always been blogging in miami, he is logged moored or and more. ivins is a fantastic lot about what's going on in the caribbean, not only literature but as a matter fact is the bbc stop the caribbean service they started publishing more and more news about what's going on and culturally, the aspects, not really the daily news. but i think there is also assigned which this confers even though it is difficult, obviously. >> this is what i wrote, as a writer truth is my mission so how does one cease to double

exist? i am all of these things, powerful statements and the ones that fit so the truth is often offensive. so why must i exist in a dichotomy is a writer? at me say i do have too. i'm new to twitter but i have the one that i follow benjamin i have one that is just me and that is where i will say these things but not necessarily because i don't want other people to see them but it's a personal dialogue with myself. but let me see, i'm trying to bring it together. there is a group of black people who are also writers and we use writing and words to effectively communicate a feeling that we are having, knowing that you are latin america and all that you know about that so then if we are constantly monitoring what we say and we are losing print publications, then there's going to come a time, it seems, that radical notions are going to

disappear or be extremely censored to the point that we wouldn't be able to say something you know, about white folks. i think that is really really scary and is lack people perhaps we should really really evaluate social media and the internet and be smart about it. like nothing has to be so black or white and i can do it at all. we just have to be really conscious of it and not necessarily, if i say something offhand, as a black woman and a black writer has someone has something to say, it's probably more powerful that other black people hear it, so using the internet that way if you understand what i'm saying. if i make a resolute -- revolutionary statement on line avid right to make a revolutionary statement on line and other black people who may think they're the only people that think are the feel that way have a right to receive that information about what other people may demonize me as. whereas the white bersin, i don't know is black writers we should really be concerned with the populace things due to their

programming. so if you all could just give me some feedback on that. it's not really question but at what point do i constantly want to monitor myself when i have something so radical to say? [applause] >> got it thing she is absolutely right that i think you have to monitor your own situation. if you don't work for anybody else, and you are not dependent on anybody else for your next book contract i all means say whatever you like. but if you have an economic reason to control what you say, then find a way that you can safely say it and you know you might have to not even change the message but change the language or say it you know only in certain venues where you don't -- >> this whole thing with

trayvon -- >> can't do what? >> even if you have an economic situation, if you are black person say for instance the whole trayvon martin situation right now and you are at "fox news" and you know good and well that "fox news" sat on that story and when they gave it, they distorted it. you have a responsibility and you can't censor yourself when it comes to the situation with their own people. sowed there is self-censorship sometimes yes and trivial stuff, but something as important as some of the things that are happening to us on a routine basis daily, you can do that. yes, you have got an economic responsibility. ifa said many times but if i had to sit there and make a choice in what i'm going to say from lack people and how many white -- dollars white people will put in my pocket. >> sister, what is your name

again? >> gloria wilson. >> i just want to emphasize something angela said and that is if you are independent -- >> the thing about this, doesn't matter whether you are independent or you have a 9 to 5 daily working. you still have to stand on the fact that this comes before them. that's all i'm saying. .. there are always they're always

limits there's no absolute freedom inning in. and responsibilities. there's difference between opinion and journal limp. the trayvon martin story was fueled by black journalists work anything mainstream media tweeting and writing on facebook about it it. and forced the story into the mainstream. [applause] and any of us, angela, and any of those like who have worked in corporate journalism know we often play a major role in forcing our ed stories to with stories. that's been a tradition of black journalist i think from the very beginning when they started desegregated media back in the 1930s when ted postton was hired as the new york post. i think there was a defending role to play. i've been blacklisted a couple

of times by various media. that's a price you pay. you have to balance that working in corporate journalist. if you're independently wealthy or you have a spouses supporting you, it frees you a lot more. but most of us end of having to do some kind of balancing but not journalist but people who work in companies. how far do you push? how much are you at the center, can you build allies intiecially to support your position. i think it's a sophisticated game that we have to play as writers in journalist. >> it is. there's not to say you won't come a day that you will say this isn't worth it. had is what i'm going say, we've all been will. most black journalists had some point had to make that decision. and they will continue to make those decisions. i'm going to sign this petition. i'm going to quit, i'm going to sue. whatever you have to do. nobody's saying you muffle your

voice. >> yes. i'd like to point out to the original question, if you feel if you have revolutionary to say, by all means, go and say it, but whatever you're going say, it's probably going to become better and more elaborate and you will know it more deeply if you think about it, and if you phase it in the correct way. if you -- there are many ways of saying things, and you might say it in a way that sounds more revolutionary, but often revolutionary doesn't have to be the more outspoken of the comments. but the deeper one. whatever it is that you want to say, there is a way to say it. and there is a platform where

you can say it. but bear in mind that the truth is still elusive and it has always been elusive. it has mought better been made o'loseive by social media. we'll take one final question. >> thank you my name is sean. i am a publisher, writer, poet, community activist as well. you know, i want to thank you all for coming out. black publish had a problem with in the past of getting their work out, then and it seemed like to me, was based on distribution, then what will change with social media? if we can't get our work out now? you know, it still seems like it's going to be the same problem as far as distry biewtion. also, i want to say that if we

go to social media, and the internet to put our information there, and if they control that, like in china, you know, where they shut down, what was it google? what happens if america gets on the communist thought and shut us down for information and we can't access. i think, getting rid of our books, it's a bad thing to do. personally, that's what i think. i think it's a trap. on that, you know, i always say like chuck d. don't believe the height. [applause] i don't think there's a danger at this point of major senseship of the media by government. i think there's censorship by the media by entities by companies. they set parameters and rules.

but i think that as pessimistic as some of us has been about america, it's interesting and it'll be after november. it's one reason i live in paris. i'm not worried about government sensorship at this point. i'm not sure i understand your point about distribution. it costs less to get your product out. for aless than it did years ago when it was all print and you had trucks and printing presses and so fort. getting it to people is a challenge. that's what troy and some of the others have talked about. as he says, to me as a sometimes publisher mostly an editor. i'm listening to this and say there's got to be a market out there for a great black book review to let people know what's out there and readable. i'm for what these guys are

doing with the journals and stuff. i didn't whawns you said on the limits on publishing. >> i will give you an camp. paid $25 for the article, and then it being published by hunting ton post. and they getting all the recognition and the hits. and his site, he was the first publisherring of the article and didn't getting in. >> sorry to jump in. but you're right. i don't think it's going to be the u.s.a., you know, you're pulling the plug on our stuff. it's going to be entities but not perhaps in a way you're thinking. it's going to be -- it can be search, so as google directs, you know, i read a story the other day that said 51% of the number one search results go to wikipedia. now, there are, i'm certain,

black entities publishing content on many, many things that wikipedia covers. but if you do a search on going. , you won't find those independent entities. you'll find a wikipedia thing. that is not to say that, you know, google is complies it, and the driving traffic to large -- away from black sites. put it that way. all right. and it's largely unnoticed by the general public because they have no way of knowing. if there is a website called, i don't know, city, arbitrarily. someone goes online and searches for african-american book website they're not going to find crush city that's been online since 1998 '87. they're going to find sites like

a site that dynamically generates products from amazon with no original content, links that you click to buy books on amazon. and if you google african-american books, my site comes up on number three. but the site that beat me is the site that i just described. it's -- and it wasn't always like that. and that's the thing. i used to go online and search for other black sites like mine. it was easy to find. if you don't know they exist you'll never find them because they're on page 37 on the google results. in terms of booking, this is the other problem, you have -- the publishers and people publishing books but we will never know about them unless they come from a big house. it's very difficult. the root is really popular first

mover that edge. great content. obviously brilliant people. working their thing, but if you, you know, try this when you get back to the office. think of an article that you've written about a book or something like that. put yourself in a position who would be looking your article and see how easy it is to find. it might be, it might not be. when you think about all the other sites doing it, you'll see my point. i'm not basing it upon the root for that matter. i'm talking about the vast majority of the people that are not getting herd. >> i see we have two other questions. yes? >> good afternoon. thank you so much for a wonderful panel. i'm a writer and all i wanted to do is write. i want to spend time turning that word, that phase into something that others will share and i joy.

i appreciate there are entities that will promote writers even if their not named brands and out there. the whole discussion about social media is dispresessing. i'd rather be in a room writing than getting in a room in getting friends and fans. i wantedded to say something, we're behind the eight ball on media. one of the panel lists mentioned about using e books sort of next waive. i have three boys always we hear about boys don't read. i would like to start thinking there is vehicle out there that can help writers to get boys to read by using social media and iphones and ipads and turning words into vehicle that will get boys more interested in reading. i think that will be a way of developing the next generation

of readers and connecting them with the new generation of writers. thank you so much. [applause] >> can i just say one thing. there is a program in brooklyn, but i don't know the name of it. for teens what they do is they take books, and they have the summer camp where the children actually bring that book to life. i believe it's been going strong for a few years now. i can try to get the information to you if you want to exchange contact information. >> okay. so keep it quick, thank you very much for the panel discussion, and my ending comment. i guess your thoughts and ideas, the way i see social media, from a writer's perspective there's a lot of negative and positive. but one positive is particularly if you're write abouting about black content or political issues. social media is can kind of like a 260. it's not posts and bloggingings

with it's music and videos. it allows an outlet to show another way of someone understanding your writing by relating it to other types of media. so that's kind of one comment that i have. thank you. >> thank you. >> again, quick. i'd like to thank the panel for being here. i'd like to know how would we a lot the black writers and publishers the opportunity to have their work promoted in the forefront when we're constantly bombarded by works of fiction and wiz arounds and war locks. i personally, i would like to i personally i appreciate good writers, writer that have a point to make. poignant work they need to address to the masses. how would we go about in expressing this and having greater writers such as yourself

on the panel express their work through the public media? >> thank you. >> i think there's a big issue we don't talk about which is about writing. how many of us want to write for mass audience? you know, i think that's an issue for black writers. a lot of writers want to write about pain and suffering. my 99-year-old father-in-law who went through that doesn't want to read about pain and suffering. he reads mystery novels. he won't go to black films or precious. he said, i don't need to see that. i lived that. i think we need to think about, i'm from haiti one of my interest would be. i'd love to do a series of books about have voodoo. i think it would be interesting as the war locks and wizards from harry potter. one of the things we need to expand is our vision of who our readers are. one of the things e