Trice Edney News Wire: The Black-Owned Wire Service Built by a Veteran of the Black Press
The Trice Edney News Wire is a Black-owned news wire service based in Washington, District of Columbia, that supplies news, features and commentary focused on African American communities to media outlets across the United States. Founded in 2010 by veteran journalist Hazel Trice Edney, the subscriber-based wire operates under the slogan “Provocative, Empowering, Unapologetically Black,” and publishes through its website, triceedneywire.com.
The wire is the flagship service of Trice Edney Communications, LLC, and it was created to do for independent Black media what Edney had previously done inside the National Newspaper Publishers Association: report from Washington and from the field on the issues that matter to Black America, and deliver that reporting to newspapers and other outlets that subscribe to it. It has been described as the only Black-owned news wire fully credentialed by the U.S. House and Senate Periodical Press Gallery.
Overview
A news wire lives or dies on usefulness to its subscribers. The Trice Edney News Wire produces original reporting, lead stories, urban news features and a roster of syndicated columnists, organized for subscribing editors into categories that include politics, social justice, civil rights, education, Black health, lifestyle and international news. Its website archives show thousands of urban news features and a continuing flow of columns and lead stories, evidence of a service built for daily and weekly publication cycles.
Because the wire is subscriber-based, its primary customers are media outlets — above all the Black Press of newspapers serving African American readers — along with organizations that distribute news through its sister services. The wire's parent company also owns National News Releases, an e-blast distribution service, and BlackPressAds, an advertising placement service, making Trice Edney Communications a small, integrated communications firm: news content, press release distribution and advertising placement under one roof.
History and Founding
Trice Edney Communications and its news wire were launched at the National Press Club in Washington on November 19, 2010. Hazel Trice Edney founded the company after leaving the National Newspaper Publishers Association that year, ending a decade with the NNPA in order to build a wire of her own. The HistoryMakers, which recorded her oral history, describes the venture as the only female-owned Black news service at its founding, fully credentialed by the congressional press gallery.
The timing was deliberate. Edney had spent years watching the Black Press — historically one of the most important institutions in African American life — struggle with the economics of the digital transition. A wire service owned by a Black woman journalist, producing Washington reporting and commentary that Black newspapers could publish, was her answer: shared reporting strength for outlets that could not each afford a Washington bureau.
The Founder's Road to the Wire
Hazel Trice Edney was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. She earned a master's degree from the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and also graduated from Harvard's Women and Power executive leadership program. Her newspaper career began in 1987, when she was hired as a reporter for the Richmond Afro-American. She went on to work as a staff writer for the Richmond Free Press until 1998, when she received the William S. Wasserman Jr. Fellowship on the Press, Politics and Public Policy from Harvard.
In 2000 she became the Washington, D.C. correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, and in 2007 she was appointed editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and Blackpressusa.com, serving until 2010. She also worked as an investigative reporter in the NNPA's NorthStar Investigative Reporting Program and served as interim executive director of the NNPA Foundation. That career — local Black newspapers, a Harvard fellowship, then a decade running Washington coverage for the Black Press — is the foundation on which the wire was built.
Ownership and Leadership
Trice Edney Communications, LLC is owned by Hazel Trice Edney, who serves as its president and chief executive officer and as editor-in-chief of the Trice Edney News Wire. Media directories list all three of the company's agencies — the wire, National News Releases and Black Press Ads — as owned by Edney. The company is, by design, an extension of its founder's professional identity: an editor-owned wire whose credibility rests on the editor's record.
Edney's standing in Washington journalism extends beyond her company. She has taught as an adjunct professor of journalism at Howard University, served as entrepreneur in residence for curriculum in Howard's School of Communications, and in 2012 became president of the Capital Press Club. She was the first African American woman inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, and her awards include the New America Media Career Achievement Award and multiple NNPA Merit Awards, among them a first-place feature story award for her final interview with Virginia death row inmate Wilbert Lee Evans.
Services and Distribution
The wire's core service is content for subscribers: reported stories, features and columns delivered for republication by newspapers and websites. Its published categories map the service's editorial priorities — lead stories and politics from Washington; social justice, civil rights and education coverage; Black health reporting; lifestyle features; and international news with a focus on the African diaspora. The wire also carries the work of nationally known columnists, giving small papers access to voices their readers follow.
Alongside the wire, National News Releases distributes clients' announcements by e-blast, and BlackPressAds places advertising with Black media. In 2015 the company opened a satellite office inside the Howard University School of Communications, in the Communications Entrepreneurship Research and Resource Center on Bryant Street NW — placing a working Black-owned media business inside the university known as “the Mecca,” where its founder also taught entrepreneurship to communications students.
Columnists and Contributors
The wire's columnist roster, visible in its current publishing, includes figures central to contemporary Black public life. Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president, writes a regular column carried by the wire. Marc H. Morial, president of the National Urban League, contributes his “To Be Equal” column. Dr. E. Faye Williams — minister, UN Peace Ambassador and president of the Dick Gregory Society — is a long-running Trice Edney columnist, as are writer David W. Marshall and financial justice advocate Charlene Crowell, whose columns address issues such as the chronic underfunding of historically Black colleges and universities.
That roster is part of the service's value proposition. A community newspaper subscribing to the wire receives not only reporting but a standing panel of commentators speaking directly to its readership — on voting rights, policing, health, education and economic justice — in a voice the wire's slogan promises will be unapologetic.
Coverage Areas
From its Washington base, the wire covers national politics and the federal government as they affect African American communities: Congress, the courts, civil rights enforcement, voting rights and the presidency. Its founder's own reporting history set that agenda. At the NNPA she covered the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001; the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon; Hurricane Katrina; and earthquake-devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was chosen by the family of Rosa Parks as the only print reporter to accompany them from Detroit to the viewing at the U.S. Capitol and on to Montgomery, Alabama, for the burial, and she interviewed then-Senator Barack Obama on his whistle-stop tour during the 2008 presidential campaign.
The wire's reach is national through its subscribers: stories and columns produced in Washington appear in Black newspapers and websites in cities across the country, and its international category carries that perspective to coverage of Africa and the diaspora.
Events and Community Presence
A staple Trice Edney event is the Stateswomen for Justice Luncheon, held annually in March as a free celebration of Women's History Month and of the anniversary of the Black Press. The luncheon reflects the company's positioning: not merely a content vendor, but an institution within the community of Black media and Black women leaders that it serves. Since its 2010 launch, the company has said, it has served thousands of clients and subscribers through its combined services.
Digital Platforms
The wire publishes at triceedneywire.com, where its stories and columns are posted with the TriceEdneyWire.com dateline that subscribing outlets carry into print and online editions. The site functions both as the wire's public face and as its archive, with categorized story banks — urban news features numbering in the thousands — that demonstrate the volume a small wire must sustain to be useful to editors publishing on daily and weekly cycles.
Recent Developments
The Trice Edney News Wire continues to publish new reporting and columns on its site, with columnists addressing current fights over voting rights, courts and public policy in the wire's established voice. More than fifteen years after its National Press Club launch, the service remains what its founder built it to be: an independent, Black-owned, woman-owned wire, credentialed on Capitol Hill, supplying the Black Press with Washington reporting and commentary that its subscribers could not produce alone — and carrying forward a tradition of Black journalism that Hazel Trice Edney joined as a young reporter in Richmond in 1987.
