a year. And a group of readers has begun an impressive act of devotion: It's raising money to keep the site alive. "I have visited many other Afro-centered sites since August 1997, and have not found one with the consciousness and integrity that TBWT has," writes Gail Slatter, a New York Times photo editor. "TBWT is special ... and what it offers consistently I have not been able to get anywhere else."
Outside investors, though, don't see much potential. Rojas dreamed of finding venture capital to build an independent international news organization. Last year he approached dozens of VCs around the country. "We are fabulous belt-tighteners," Rojas says, and his investment proposal reflected that: $2 million to $3 million would establish TBWT as an international news presence in three years. "For $3 million, we could have bureaus in 20 cities around the country," he says. "One in London to cover black communities there and in the rest of Europe, and a bureau in South Africa, West Africa and the Caribbean."
But Rojas was turned down by every firm and fund he approached. "I went to the New York New Media Association, which runs a million-dollar fund," he recalls. "Three of us went in to speak in front of five people at a table, and we had 10 minutes. At the end, they asked questions like 'Why approach us? Why not go to wealthy black celebrities?'"
Despite the offensiveness of the question, it has an interesting answer. As have many others before him, Rojas found that black celebrities are not given to speculative investments in new media. "Looking in the black community is really frustrating," says Joel Dreyfuss, a senior editor at Fortune magazine who has solicited funding from the African-American elite in the past. "Most black wealth is first-generation wealth. That's not the money that goes into high-risk ventures."
The NYNMA funding went to another company that presented that day - Bikini.com. Jeanne Sullivan, who runs the New York Angel Investors Program, the NYNMA fund to which Rojas spoke, recalls meeting him. "There's no doubt he had a great team," says Sullivan. "He was smart and articulate, but he didn't have his revenue stream crystallized. Bikini was headed by a dynamic team which has strong links in the entertainment industry. They had syndication, knew how to leverage and make those opportunities work, and we gave them over $1.2 million."
Fritz Jordan, an African-American VC and a cofounder of Vcapital.com, has his doubts about the site. "I'm more intimate with the black marketplace than other venture capitalists," he says. "In the real world, you don't have an enormous number of black consumers buying from black companies." Although he's never met TBWT's founder, he suggests that Rojas may be too editorial-minded and not sufficiently aware of business reality. "He has the vision, the good entrepreneurial vision," Jordan says. "But he needs to treat it as a company, not as a Web site."
Other entrepreneurs have tried to create sites for African-Americans, and most have failed. This happened in part because of an inability to articulate the business logic of their ventures to investors, and in part because of a naive belief that breaking into the industry requires little more than a good idea and perseverance. McLean Mashingaidze Greaves, the president of Web-consulting firm Digital Melanin, ran a much-lauded site for young, urban African-Americans called CafeLosNegroes, until low revenue forced him to close the site down last year. "I was trying to establish a proof of concept," says Greaves. "I had worked for VC firms and software companies, and I knew they would see this as really high risk." After a few years of struggling, a continent away from Silicon Valley and across the bridge from Silicon Alley, Greaves - tired of stepping over drunks on his way to work - decided to cut his losses. "We were out of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn," says Greaves of his old working
