Black News Channel Shutdown

According to mainstream media across the country, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s television station, the Black News Channel, has shut down due to the network failing to generate as much revenue as expected in recent years.
Just beginning its run in 2020, the news outlet focused on employing brown and black people in the surrounding Florida area. Khan, majority owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and a person of color himself, founded the organization under the guise of providing equitable employment for minorities in the aforementioned area.
As early as two weeks ago, reports arose detailing staff at the network not being paid in what seemed to be a purposeful move on the part of Khan to distance himself from the fledgling media entity.
While this move may have seemed indicative of the stance Khan had for his business, the official statement from the station’s CEO verified that this decision to close the station has been in the cards for months.
“During the past few months, we have endured very painful workforce reductions at all levels of the network as we worked to achieve our financial goal of a break-even business,” Princell Hair, the station’s CEO, said in the memo, the Los Angeles Times reported. In a world where clicks and interactions make money for media companies, the Black News Network was unable to meet their bottom line from a financial standpoint, which led to Khan and company leadership ultimately severing ties to the station.
Despite reports that the staff at the station hadn’t been paid in two weeks leading up to the shutdown, Hair still noted their contributions to keeping the station afloat during its brief stint.
“This has forced all of you to do more with less, and your contributions have been remarkable. Unfortunately, due to challenging market conditions and global financial pressures, we have been unable to meet our financial goals, and the timeline afforded to us has run out,” said Hair in a message to workers regarding the hardships faced by them in recent months.
According to the report done by The Hill, the station only reached an average of 10,000 viewers out of a potential projected range of 50 million cable and satellite households.
Many staffers who have since been laid off came from other stations under the belief of what the station was meant to represent: a station by black people to cover black issues. In lew of current events, many such workers are now currently unemployed without any prior notice from their leaders until the official announcement had been made.
“It’s messed up that black people can’t have their own nice things. [Black News Channel] seemed like a good idea though, so I hope this situation doesn’t make other black people not want to be involved in black-led movements,” said Dave Shorts, a junior biology major Kenner, Louisiana.
While Khan’s station may have been short lived and ultimately a failure in terms of what it was supposed to achieve, the blueprint that it’s created is still something that young black and brown people such as Shorts believe can be implemented in the future.