A New Online Mag Targets A Specific Audience.

THE WASHINGTON POST, in conjunction with famed scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., has launched a new website called The Root dedicated to serving the interests of African-American readers.

The Root will be a 21st-century version of a national black newspaper, Gates told the Washington Post, featuring articles from notable black writers, such as the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell.

In recent years, the media has become more and more focused on who their readers are, and molding their product around who will look at it. Is this a good thing or bad thing? It seems to make good business sense, but does the news for Caucasian-Americans differ from that of African-Americans?

Are we deciding what people should know based upon their skin color? Or is this a way of serving a community that has traditionally been ignored by the mainstream media?

And will an online "national black newspaper" erode the circulation of traditional black newspapers like The Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune or the Amsterdam News?