News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people 

Summary: Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The VergeHow a Black news startup was born from a racial justice reckoning Lauren Williams is the co-founder and CEO of Capital B, a new nonprofit media company dedicated to news for Black audiences. Capital B launched on January 31st, with both a national news site and a local newsroom dedicated to Atlanta — and the company plans to expand to more cities over time. This interview is a little looser and chattier than usual since Lauren used to be the editor-in-chief and senior vice president of The Verge’s sister site, Vox.com. We were co-workers for a long time, and we’re still friends. So while I did my best to ask all the Decoder questions, we might have made each other laugh a little more than usual. I wanted to know why Lauren decided to go and found a startup, what the last year of building that startup ahead of launch has been like, and how she thinks about standing out in a media business where the pressures of social media and search traffic kind of make everything look the same. And, of course, I wanted to know how she plans to grow. Now that she’s the CEO, how is she making decisions about Capital B’s path forward? Lauren was just on the podcast Recode Media with Peter Kafka, where she talked in more detail about the editorial vision for Capital B. That conversation is great, and you should listen to it, but it’s not what we talked about. I wanted to spend more time on, well, Decoder stuff: being a founder, raising money, and making decisions. Lauren is a really sharp leader, and I think you’re going to like this one. Okay. Lauren Williams, co-founder and CEO of Capital B. Here we go. This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity. A full transcript will be available soon. It’s hard to remember what that moment felt like, particularly in media. Almost two years ago now — it was around the time of the George Floyd protest — we were in the middle of the pandemic; there was an election coming up. It did feel like the media was failing. It had failed to tell some important story, and a lot of people were just opting out of the traditional media ecosystem. Do you think that Capital B sits as a part of that traditional ecosystem? Does it sit next to it? Are you aiming to build something else entirely? I think it sits next to it, but it is, in that sense, a part of that movement of [thinking] something here is not working. Something here in traditional media is too constrained or too set in its ways to respond to — either from a business perspective or from an editorial perspective — the needs of the moment. That is, I think, really, really seen in local news, which is failing across the country and desperately needs refreshing. That is a business issue for local news. It’s a cultural issue as well. There’s an enormous trust problem, and those business issues and those trust issues really do go hand in hand. They’re aligned, and the effects of those issues are one and the same. Misinformation and disinformation are rising, lack of local news contributes to polarization, and we need new ideas to respond to those issues. You left Vox in February of 2021. It’s now February of 2022. You’ve been building for a year. What has that process been like? It’s been a lot of really intense fundraising for most of it. We needed to raise a lot of money to do what we wanted to do. Our idea is ambitious: to have a national newsroom and also launch a local newsroom. We want to have a centralized business function that’s going to be able to support not just our first local newsroom, which is in Atlanta, but also our subsequent local newsrooms. That’s not cheap. And we want to be able to do the kind of journalism that we want to do for our audience and that we feel like our audience deserves — that’s also not cheap. We have to raise a lot of money, and it’s hard t