Nyesha Stone launched Carvd N Stone in 2017 because she could not understand why the reporters covering her city saw it so differently, and nearly a decade later she says what Black journalism is short of is not writers.
“We just need our respect back, and we also need people to begin to fund us,” she said.
She is blunt about what the gap costs the person doing the work. “I’m tired of writing an article, and you’re the one getting sales, but I actually don’t have money for groceries,” Stone said.
Stone is 30, an award winning journalist from Milwaukee who studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and now runs the company from Georgia. Carvd N Stone is an independent news platform, and the company’s own site describes it as a news company that only reports on original positive news coverage.
She traces the start to the 2016 election and the non-Black reporters around her. “I just couldn’t realize why their perspective, their lens, was so different,” she said. She found her model in the Chicago Defender and its founder, Robert Sengstacke Abbott. “I wanted to be rebellious just like that,” she said.
The positive news part was an accident. “I did not plan for it to be a positive news company,” she said. “I just realized within a year I was only covering positive news.” It is not avoidance, and she says so plainly. “I want you to know that I know bad things are happening in this world,” she said.
Nearly a decade of it adds up to hundreds upon hundreds of stories, two seasons of a podcast, two panels, and a Carvd N Stone Foundation that has raised more than $30,000 in scholarships and grants and taught journalism skills to more than 100 students. The company lists a CNS Scholarship Fund and a CNS Travel Writing Scholarship on its own site. She has a ten year plan.
What she asks of a reader is small enough to do tonight. “Stop giving any clicks to people you actually do not support,” she said.
And she has a line for what the job is supposed to be. “Human being first, journalist second, means I see you,” she said. “I hurt just as much as you hurt, too.”
