From FAMU to the Newsroom: Black Journalists Making Pensacola's Stories Heard

<p>The Florida A&M University School of Journalism has been producing Black journalists for nearly 70 years. Many of them came home to the Gulf Coast — or never really left. Their bylines built careers and preserved a history that white-owned papers ignored.</p><p>The Pensacola Beacon is built on that tradition. Our scholarship program exists because we believe the next great Black journalist might be in Belmont-DeVilliers right now, writing for nobody, building a portfolio nobody publishes. We want to change that.</p><h2>The Pipeline FAMU Built</h2><p>FAMU's journalism program was designed with a specific purpose: to train Black reporters and editors for Black publications. In an era when white-owned newspapers employed almost no Black journalists, FAMU gave students a path into the profession that did not require assimilation or compromise.</p><p>Pensacola had no shortage of FAMU graduates who came home and went to work. The Pensacola Times Journal, a Black-owned weekly that ran from the 1960s through the 1990s, was built largely by FAMU alumni. Readers trusted it because the reporters came from the same streets they did.</p><h2>The Stories They Covered That Nobody Else Would</h2><p>Local Black newspapers covered what the white press ignored: school board meetings that affected Black children, businesses opening on DeVilliers Street, civil rights arrests, church fundraisers, neighborhood crime that got no mention in the larger papers.</p><p>This coverage was not trivial. It was the record. It was what future researchers, historians, and community members would use to understand what actually happened in this city — not the version sanitized for white audiences.</p><p>Several FAMU alumni who covered Pensacola in the 1970s and 1980s went on to work at larger publications — the Tampa Bay Times, the Miami Herald, and in rare cases national outlets. But many stayed, because Pensacola needed coverage that was not coming from anywhere else.</p><h2>What That Means for Us Today</h2><p>The news industry is not what it was. Staff sizes have shrunk across every outlet. The Pensacola News Journal — the largest remaining daily — employs a fraction of the reporters it did in 2000. Coverage of Black communities in Escambia County has thinned to nearly nothing.</p><p>This is not unique to Pensacola. It is happening everywhere. But the impact is felt most acutely in communities that were already underserved.</p><p>The Beacon's scholarship program is our answer to that gap. We fund Black students pursuing media and journalism degrees — with the expectation that when they graduate, they will tell the stories that need telling in this city. Not just about Black Pensacola, but about everything: city hall, schools, small business, culture, food, crime, recovery, growth.</p><p>The goal is not to create a Black press that only covers Black communities. The goal is to build a pipeline of Black journalists who are present in every newsroom, covering every story, with full institutional knowledge of this place and these people.</p><h2>Apply for the 2026 Scholarship</h2><p>If you are a Black student from Northwest Florida pursuing a degree in journalism, communications, media studies, or a related field, we want to hear from you. Applications are open now at our <a href=/scholarships>scholarships page</a>.</p><p>You do not need to have a portfolio. You do not need a 4.0 GPA. You need to be enrolled or planning to enroll in a journalism or media program, and you need to be from this region. That is enough to start.</p><p>FAMU's legacy is not in the buildings or the archives. It is in the reporters who went out every day and wrote the truth about their city — even when nobody else was writing it. That is the legacy we are trying to extend.</p>