Hip-Hopping the Digital Divide

HIP-HOPPING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
[SOURCE: BusinessWeek, AUTHOR: Catherine Holahan]
When entertainment entrepreneurs Russell Simmons and Navarrow Wright first developed an online destination for hip-hop music and culture eight years ago, the World Wide Web wasn't ready. White North Americans were logging on in record numbers, but the African American and Latino communities that birthed the hip-hop genre in the 1970s, by and large, were not. There was a so-called digital divide separating urban youth, many of them nonwhite, from their wealthier, often white, counterparts. Hip-hop was on the wrong side of that divide. Until now. New numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, scheduled for release Nov. 14, show the gap is closing as more black, Hispanic, and inner-city youth are not only logging on, but doing so via high-speed connections. The shift isn't lost on hip-hop entrepreneurs such as Simmons and Wright, who have launched multimedia-filled social Web sites that reflect the music, news, and culture relevant to urban minorities. The goal is to attract audiences that may feel underserved by mainstream social networks such as News Corp.'s MySpace and Google's YouTube, where millions of users submit content on a variety of subjects. "Back in 2000, we knew that it was very early stages and that they weren't online en masse," says Wright, who sold his earlier site 360hiphop.com to Viacom's (VIA) Black Entertainment Television in 2000. "We think the timing makes sense now."
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071112_770340...