Explore the first issue of Black Executive Journal — The Magazine, covering ownership, global business, media control, and the capital behind growth.
Black Executive Journal — The Magazine, Issue No. 1: The Ownership Issue.
Who owns Black media, who holds the votes, and what it costs to build something you don’t control. Featuring “The Board Seat Problem,” the Frank McWorter story, and the blended finance playbook
This morning, we’re proud to share the inaugural issue of Black Executive Journal — The Magazine.
This has been two years in the making.
Through our print and digital work and the Diaspora Desk, we’ve been building a publication for readers who want to understand business beyond the announcement or headline. The magazine gives us more room to do that work, and something you can keep, revisit, and share.
Our first issue is about ownership. Who owns the business? Who holds the votes? Who gets to decide what happens to something other people have spent years building?
Our cover story, “The Board Seat Problem,” follows the loss of BET.com’s journalism to the ownership structure above it. It also examines the alternatives Cathy Hughes, Morgan DeBaun, Byron Allen, and Roland Martin have built.
Elsewhere, we tell the story of Frank McWorter, who bought his wife’s freedom before his own and used enterprise and land to help free the rest of his family. It deserves to be read as a business story, with all the ingenuity, calculation, and determination that involved.
“PIDG and the Blended Finance Playbook” looks at a different ownership question—how capital can be structured to finance projects otherwise considered too risky, and what community development financial institutions can learn from that approach.
The 40-page issue also includes a twenty-five-year timeline, an ownership chart, and forty signals from across Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.
Black and African business leadership is central to our perspective. But the reporting takes us wherever the story leads—to investors, competitors, governments, and institutions around the world. You cannot understand a company without understanding the market around it.
That’s what we’re bringing together through the Journal, our digital coverage, and the Diaspora Desk. We want readers to be able to follow a development as it happens, spend time with the deeper story, and return to reporting that helps them make sense of the next one.
There is a much larger institution taking shape here. This magazine is an important part of it, built on the work already underway and the readers who have followed us along the way.
Thank you for being part of these first two years. We’re proud to put this issue in your hands.
The Ownership Issue is our October 2026 edition, available in premium-color print for $25.99.
Read the market before it moves.
Noah Carmichael
Editor-in-Chief
