TEXAS’ Widest Circulated and Read Newspaper with a Black Perspective

If you know African- AmericanNews&Issues’ history, already know that when the first edition of the Acres Home’s Community News hit the streets in February 1996, our focus was limited to providing pertinent information about African Americans residing north of the 610 Loop. It concerned us that the community (in which Malonson Company Inc.’s corporate headquarters was located) had been historically ignored by the existing media. We were, indeed, justly proud of the outstanding and very progressive things the newly created Acres Home Citizens Chamber of Commerce was doing and wanted to share our successes with the outside world. History certainly will record that we did a good job, of carrying out our mission. But we soon learned that...that wasn’t enough.
Basically, we were publishing the same kind of articles that are now featured in the Houston Chronicle’s This Week, which is a direct result of the good job that weekly Black newspapers were already doing. To make a long story short, we quickly recognized the sad fact that competition was brisk (among publications that reported what’s called “Puff Stories” in newspaper jargon), but when it came to reporting all news without fear or favor (investigative tell it like it is articles), existing newspapers took the M. C. Hammer posture, i.e., “You Can’t Touch This.” Therefore, AAN&I was literally forced to become Texas’ widest circulated and read newspaper with a Black perspective. No brag, just fact. Even so, this is our Mother’s Day 2006 edition, so what does all of that have to do with “Mother’s Wit?”
We Must Understand, pro-gress can’t be validated without history. If you know AAN&I’s history, it’s no mystery why we’re considered the watchers on the wall and Black America’s strongest editorial voice. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to conclude that the biggest problem our colleagues had was trying to address Black America’s unique problems, using mainstream America’s political correct perspectives. We had to do extensive research to make sure that our articles were uniquely different from other newspapers. Consequently, they were so uniquely different, until we immediately became a strong, uncompromised editorial voice that viewed the world from a common sense descendant of slaves’ perspective. Hold that thought, because it will open your mind to a totally new way of reading newspapers.
Perhaps we did it so smoothly until you have yet to notice that we have been inserting a For Your Information (FYI) feature into our text for over a year. We came up with that innovated idea, which is among too many more to enumerate here, when it became apparent that today’s society communicates mostly with buzz words and clichés, that leave readers more confused than informed. Need we explain further why our people are being destroyed for lack of knowledge? To answer that, one really should understand the definition for knowledge, so we have no choice but to do a little research to make sure that our audited estimated 2 million readers and million more accessing our Web page (www.aframnews.com ) are properly edified. There’s no limit to the research we’ll do to make sure we don’t publish anything that might be confusing.
We Must Understand, journalists must master words they use, or their articles are likely to confuse their readers. For instance, do you think “mother” is an appellation or designation? What do you think when people say, “All women aren’t mothers?” When we hear, “Carrying babies for nine months don’t make women mothers,” we grab our Dictionary of Word Orgins, to read FYI: “The ancestral Indo-European word for ‘mother’ was ‘mater’, which has descendants in virtually all the modern European languages. It was probably based on the syllable ma, suggested by the burbling of a suckling baby, which also lies behind English mama, mamma (and indeed mammal), but in prehistoric Germanic it evolved to ‘mathar,” and English mother.” Do you see how it works, or are you still curious about the “Mother Wit” equation?
Ideally, a good journalist can’t afford to be intellectually lazy. Our FYI feature is a safeguard. It forces us to research. That’s a good thing, because one is never too old to learn and researching sends one back to school. We’ve learned a lot researching. That’s why we can explain that common sense, or “Mother’s Wit” isn’t always wisdom, or even knowledge. Common sense, or mother’s wit, is when you touch a hot stove and get burned, you should learn not to touch hot stoves. Knowledge, however, is that you’ve learned that a stove is harmful from watching others being burned. Wisdom, however, is to not let curiosity tempt you to touch the stove to see if you guessed right. Happy Mother’s Day 2006.