Most would think it impossible to omit Black-owned businesses when writing about a city whose population is roughly 80 percent Black. But, The New York Times is accused of doing just that. In the travel section, the print institution ran a story on new businesses in Detroit’s Corktown area in its Sunday, June 22 issue, despite it being pointed out to the writer that African American businesses had been left out after the story ran online Tuesday, June 17.
Detroit painter Kelly Guillory called freelance writer Julie Alvin, who hails from Grosse Pointe, out via social media for the oversight in her article, “A Gleam of Renewal in Struggling Detroit.” In response, Alvin tweeted: “only realizing now that none of those businesses were black-owned and I deeply regret the omission.” Yet, despite that admission, the story still ran in the Sunday paper.
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While the writer is rightfully being taken to task for her glaring mistake, it’s a bigger fail that The New York Times did not catch the error itself and, worse yet, ran the piece anyway. As several Detroit blogs and other publications have pointed out, this is not new behavior for The New York Times. Whenever the print institution has run “positive” stories on Detroit, they claim that African Americans have been routinely missing in action but, yet, are highly visible in “negative” stories about the city.