Jet And Ebony Hit by Ad Lose!!!

The time is now to support black businesses now more then ever. According to NBC Jet and Ebony are making tough choices!!!

The ranks of Ebony and Jet magazines have been shaken up, with cuts that include the elimination of the publications’ editorial director.
According to a report published Monday on the Web site for the Maynard Institute, an organization dedicated to diversity training in the news media, employees who were cut may be able to apply for new positions.

The company is “executing a multi-phase reorganization,” according to a statement, of which employees were notified last week.

The company, Johnson Publishing, ranked No. 1 on Crain’s 2008 list of Chicago’s largest minority-owned companies. With $453.3 million in revenue in 2007, the company beat out Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Inc.

But Ebony and Jet, which target the African-American community, have struggled amid a turbulent economy and declining print advertising sales throughout the media industry. Ebony’s ad sales dropped almost 19% to $14.9 million in 2008, according to Magazine Publishers of America data. Advertising revenue for Jet sank 41% to $5.7 million in 2008.

Source: NBC Chicago/Business

Will Financial Aid Meet The Grade?

Boondocks Writer Says Obama Aint Black!!!

McGruder asserted that Obama is Not Black…

McGruder asserted that Obama is not black because he is not a descendant of a slave. “The person who is one of us in the White House is Michelle Obama and her momma,” McGruder said.

NAACP Image Award Nominees!!!

 NAACP Image Award Nominees, Click the link below to see if your fav’s made the cut!!!

http://www.naacp.org/news/press/2009-01-07/40th.NIA.Nominees.Release.pdf

Source: NAACP.org

DMX Speaks About His Life and What’s Next from Behind Bars!!!

In his Own Words!!!
Part 1

Part 2

DMX spent a lot of time in Arizona in 2008, mostly making court dates and appearing before a judge. Now the fallen rap star sits in a Phoenix jail cell as he awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to multiple charges (animal cruelty, drug possession and theft) in December.

But after X serves his time, he says he’s never returning to the state he once called home.

“I’m not looking back,” he explained to Fox 10, a local TV affiliate, in an exclusive interview from jail. “I’m not coming back. I’m not coming back for a show. I’m not coming back for a visit. I’m not even driving through the state. If I’m on a plane and they’re flying through, I’m gonna go around.”

The rapper said he fell in love with Arizona after a late-night studio session a few years ago. He watched the sun rise and said he felt as if he had landed in “God’s country.” He quickly discovered otherwise, though.

“I met the devil in God’s country,” X said. “It’s not so much who [was the devil], it’s what happens and the things that the devil does. It’s not so much a person, even though he acts through people. You can’t call any one person the devil. Because no one person has the power to be the devil.”

DMX denied implying that local sheriff Joe Arpaio was the devil he referred to. In interviews, the hard-nosed law official made no bones about wanting to bring the rapper to justice. Arpaio calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff” and gained notoriety for stripping NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal of his honorary police badge after the basketball player’s explicit freestyle rap about Kobe Bryant.

DMX, for his part, said he’s completed the gospel album he told MTV News about last January. The rapper, who had a penchant for including moving prayers on each of his albums, said he’s spending more time with the Bible as he sits in 23-hour lockdown. His plan after his release is to move forward with his transition to becoming a pastor. X has long talked about becoming a prominent member of a church. The rapper believes he’s been put in his situation to help someone.

“I came here to meet somebody,” he said. “I don’t know who it is, but I came to tell them that Jesus loves them. To tell them about the glory of God.”

In the roughly 10-minute interview, DMX also discussed his fiancée (based in Miami, where the rapper has also had a number of run-ins with the law), his eight children and his plans to star in a reality show called “Pain & Perseverance.”

“I can reach people the average person can’t reach because I’m as grounded as I am,” he said.

DMX is scheduled to be sentenced January 30 in an Arizona superior court.

Source: My Fox Phoenix, MTV

No God Ads – Lose!!!

Italian atheists have lost a bid to run “no God” advertisements on city buses after strong opposition from conservative political parties, a member of the group said on Saturday.

The ads reading “The bad news is that God doesn’t exist. The good news is that you don’t need him” were to have been put on buses in the northern city of Genoa, home to the Catholic cardinal who is head of the Italian Bishops Conference.
The mock-up was ready and the contract was sent to the group for signing but the publicity agency changed its mind and said the ad could not run it because it violated an ethics in advertising code, according to Giorgio Villella of The Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics (UAAR).

Mychal Bell of The Jena 6 speaks Out!

Mychal Bell the face of the Jena 6 case talks to cnn about the pressure he felt to be perfect and why he tried to end his own life

Jas 4:14Jas 4:14
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
14 Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. It...: or, For it is  

whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

MONROE, Louisiana (CNN) — Mychal Bell says he felt pressure to be perfect after his part of 2006’s “Jena 6″ assault case was over. When police alleged last month that he wasn’t, the Louisiana teen took his Christmas money and sought a gun to kill himself.

Mychal Bell says he’s strived to do well after Jena, and last month’s shoplifting allegations devastated him.

1 of 3 Distraught after being arrested on suspicion of shoplifting and battery, the 18-year-old Bell says, he pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger.

The gun misfired, and he aimed at his chest and tried again. The bullet ripped through his body, and he fell to the floor of his grandmother’s home in Monroe on December 29.

“It just got to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Bell, who is recovering from the wound, said in an interview with CNN. Watch Bell describe shooting himself »

In December 2006, Bell — then an all-state running back for Jena High’s football team — was one of six black teenagers charged in adult court with attempted murder and conspiracy charges in the beating of a white classmate in Jena, Louisiana, an incident that followed months of racial tensions in the community of about 3,000 people.

The “Jena 6″ case drew national attention from civil rights groups that said the charges were excessive, and an estimated 15,000-plus people turned out for a September 2007 rally in Jena on the youths’ behalf.

The charges were eventually reduced. Bell, only 16, pleaded guilty to battery in a juvenile court and moved to Monroe. There, for the past year, he attended high school, chasing a 2009 graduation and — although Louisiana wouldn’t let him play football at his new school — hopes of a college football scholarship.

“I just wanted to show everybody that I really wasn’t the type of kid that everybody was making me out to be,” said Bell, who worked out with his school’s team even though he couldn’t play in games. “Nobody will ever be perfect, but it’s like that’s where my mind was. You need to be perfect.”

Bell said he felt people were constantly watching him, hoping he’d fail: ” ‘Just mess up, just mess up.’ There was a lot of pressure on me.”

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‘Jena 6′ figure tried to commit suicide, police say
So he was devastated, he said, when he was accused of shoplifting at a Monroe mall on December 24.

Police say surveillance video appears to show Bell stuffing merchandise into a bag in a Dillard’s store while another male seems to serve as a lookout.

Bell walked out with the bag without paying, officials said, and a security guard approached and took it from him. Police said Bell and the other male fled, and guards chased Bell because he’d had the bag. Authorities say it contained $370 worth of clothes.

Bell hid under a car in the parking lot, and as a store security officer tried to pull Bell out, he hit the guard in the face with his elbow, police said. Bell, who was charged with shoplifting, simple battery and resisting arrest, was released on bail, according to authorities.

Investigators don’t know who the other male was, and Bell “admitted to everything” to a detective, Lt. Jeff Harris said.

In his CNN interview in Monroe, Bell — who is back in school despite being in pain from his wound and subsequent surgery — didn’t comment on the shoplifting allegations because the case is pending.

But he said he “cried every day” after the arrest and “could never get back right.”

“Christmas is my favorite time of year, and I just lay in bed, I cried, I tried to shake it off,” he said. “I knew it was nothing but the devil, and I tried to shake it off.”

On December 29, he said, he sought a weapon.

“I kept asking people, ‘Do you know where I can get a gun from?’ … I take my Christmas money to buy a gun; it don’t matter how much it costs,” he said.

After receiving a gun from someone, he “went awry” in his grandmother’s house, he said.

“I stood up, and I just put the gun to my head, and when I put it to my head, the gun clicked,” he said. “So I was like, the gun must not be working.

“So then I put it to my chest, and when I shot … I just stood there, and then I hit the floor, and then I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

The weapon was a .22-caliber handgun, police said. The shot punctured a lung. In the hospital, Bell said, he felt remorse when he saw his relatives.

In the CNN interview, he was asked what would have happened had he shot himself in the head.

“I would have hurt my family, my friends, my classmates and everybody who support me,” Bell said.

Bell said he’s felt a lot of pressure to do well after Jena. The case thrust him in the national spotlight, with civil rights activists Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III leading the 2007 march.

“I just hear so many people supporting me and everything, and I always feel that if I ever make a mistake again, that whatever I do, it is going to have an effect,” he said.

Having survived a suicide attempt, Bell now looks ahead to what he almost lost, his dreams and the pride he’ll have when he achieves them.

“The biggest thing is graduation,” he said. “One of the main things you want to do is walk across that stage and get that diploma. … And everybody will say, ‘he did it.’ ”

And then, he hopes, college football. Before the December shoplifting allegations, Bell was on the verge of getting a college football scholarship, according to his attorney Carol Powell-Lexing.

“A year from now, I want to be in college. … I will be on somebody’s roster, playing college ball,” Bell said. “I love football Saturdays

Source CNN