Time Warner Acquires Africana.com

Posted on September 8, 2000

Time Warner Inc. has announced that it has acquired Africana.com, Inc., an Internet portal which provides content on the history, culture and contemporary condition of Africa and its Diaspora. Africana.com currently receives over 500,000 monthly visits and about 3.6 million monthly page views. Africana.com is expected to be a key component of Time Warner's strategy targeting the African-American market.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Africana.com was co-founded in January 1999 by Harvard University educators Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, along with Harry M. Lasker III, to enhance educational and economic opportunities for blacks in America and around the world. In addition to its acquisition of Africana.com, Time Warner entered into a consulting agreement with Drs. Gates and Appiah, who are leading scholars in African and Afro-American studies.

Upon completion of Time Warner's planned merger with AOL, Africana.com will be fully integrated with AOL. In the interim, Africana.com will report to Derek Johnson, Time Warner's vice president for corporate initiatives.

According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Africana.com's Chairman, ``We're extraordinarily excited about the prospect of joining the Time Warner family. Africana.com is dedicated to providing authoritative content about black people throughout the world and helping to bridge the digital divide. Time Warner, under the imaginative leadership of Gerald Levin, has demonstrated a profound commitment to serving the diverse interests of the black community through a wide variety of media. It is, in fact, the premier producer of black entertainment and culture. Time Warner's resources, skills, and content will greatly bolster Africana.com's ability to share black culture with people all around the world. We aim to be the premier black educational portal. This is a thrilling development for all of us who care about diversity on the World Wide Web.''

In addition to making available a vast array of authoritative original and third-party content, Africana.com offers a variety of interactive experiences, such as Radio Africana, which provides live access to some 80 black radio stations worldwide. The educational features of the site include hosting the Adopt-a-School program, which distributes educational materials to disadvantaged schools, and Blackboard, an online learning center for teachers and students.