TheGrio
news, opinion, entertainment and video content website geared toward African Americans
TheGrio is a brand name owned by American media company Allen Media Group for a television network and a website aimed at African Americans.
History
TheGrio is to "focus on news and events that have a unique interest and pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience," offering what co-founder and Executive Editor David Wilson feels is "underrepresented in existing national news outlets".
The website's name is derived from the word griot, the term for a West African oral historian and storyteller.
The website originally launched in June 2009 as a division of NBC News. It was founded by the team who created the documentary film Meeting David Wilson. It became a division of MSNBC in 2013. In 2014, it was sold to its founders. In June 2016, Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios acquired the site.
The TV channel was founded as Light TV in 2016 by reality television producer Mark Burnett and his wife, actress Roma Downey, as an inspirational network as part of his chairmanship of MGM Television, which operated the network. It was sold to Entertainment Studios in late 2020, and relaunched as TheGrio TV in January 2021, with a Black-specific programming focus.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “TheGrio” as news, opinion, entertainment and video content website geared toward African Americans. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as news, opinion, entertainment and video content website geared toward African Americans. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7738314. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2013, 2014 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “TheGrio” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.