Why The Plug is covering Black and brown tech companies

Hanaa’ Tameez of Nieman Lab writes about The Plug, which covers Black and brown technology companies and is led by Sherrell Dorsey.

Tameez wrties, “Dorsey launched The Plug in 2016 as a daily, curated newsletter that shared stories about Black startups. By 2018, just after Dorsey graduated from Columbia’s computational journalism program, she delved into original reporting.

“‘The conversations that I was seeing five or six years ago were either these magical minority stories or they were profile pieces, but you would never see a ton of rigorous reporting in the way in which you would see Microsoft, Tesla, and Facebook covered in detail,’ Dorsey said. ‘Journalism related to Black and brown founders has always been intellectually lazy when we’re talking about coverage within business and tech news. [With The Plug, I] really wanted to step in and to say we still deserve great, strong, intellectually challenging, targeted, rigorous, and data-driven reporting.’

“The Plug is funded through grants, brand partnerships, advertising, payments for its original research, and subscriptions. Non-paying readers can get the daily newsletter and certain stories for free. Subscribers to The Plug PRO get access to weekly reports, The Plug’s data library, access to a private community and member events, and discounts to its live summit, for $300 a year.”

Read more here.