Brittany Noble is about to begin her second week as anchor of “The Breakdown,” the daily live newscast that the former local TV news anchor leads for Roland Martin’s Black Star Network.
Noble has worked as a news anchor and correspondent for local TV stations in St. Louis (KMOV-TV), Indianapolis (WISH-TV), Jackson, Miss. (WJTV-TV) and Jackson, Tenn. (WBBJ-TV), after starting her career in tiny Jonesboro, Ark. (KAIT-TV), which is No. 182 on Nielsen’s list of 210 TV markets across the U.S.
But the fact that her new show is part of the expanding lineup of Martin’s wholly independent Black Star Network venture is a pact that brings Noble full circle to where her journalism career took off in 2014. She was working as a reporter in St. Louis when headlines erupted around the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, in nearby Ferguson, Mo. “The Breakdown With Brittany Noble” streams live at noon ET Monday through Friday via the Black Star Network app and Martin’s YouTube page.
Noble and Martin knew each other from their work with the National Association of Black Journalists. Martin at the time was covering news for TV One and for Tom Joyner’s long-running syndicated daily radio program. At the height of the controversy around Brown’s death, Martin had Noble call in to his segments to deliver on the ground reporting on the shooting and the protests that erupted afterward.
“Fast forward all these years, Roland has just been in my corner, championing Black-owned media,” Noble tells Variety. “It takes a lot of money and investment to put on a show. I may have good ideas, but I just didn’t have the backing to do it.”
Black Star Network is anchored by Martin’s daily news, roundtable and commentary series “Roland Martin Unfiltered,” which is distributed via YouTube and the Black Star app. The outlet that launched in 2020 has expanded with other lifestyle and news analysis programs. But “The Breakdown” is its first traditional news hour dedicated to up-to-the minute headlines and a mix of newsmaker interviews, trends and a closing lifestyle segment that Noble has dubbed “For the Culture.”
Noble is blunt about having been one of an estimated 300,000 Black women to have lost her job last year. The ability to adapt her training in traditional news into a new format and platform that allows her to reach millions of viewers with news and information is nothing less than her dream job.
“I feel free now. I feel free because I’m actually able to share these stories. I felt imprisoned in local news, not being able to share news that impacted our community,” Noble says. “How many times was I in news meetings and trying to tell stories and got shut down? And I was internalizing that because I knew there were stories that people needed to know and that we should be sharing with them that we weren’t able to. So now, I’m able to maintain my professionalism, because that’s what we do as journalists, as news anchors, but I feel free in the sense that I’m able to finally bring this information to the community.”
Noble began making appearances delivering headlines and serving as a guest host on “Roland Martin Unfiltered” prior to the Jan. 26 launch of “The Breakdown With Brittany Noble.” Noble is based in Indianapolis while “Roland Martin Unfiltered” originates from Washington, D.C. Martin’s YouTube page has grown significantly during the past 18 months to 1.9 million followers at present.
“The Breakdown With Brittany Noble” represents “the evolution of digital news tailored for audiences that demand both depth and context,” said Martin, who is founder and CEO of Black Star Network. “Our community has shown, time and again, that they’re not just viewers, they’re participants in the national conversation. Brittany delivers insight with precision, integrity and passion.”
Noble had doggedly pursued her own show at various local TV news outlets. But she now feels firmly in the right place to reach far beyond a single region of the country at a time when solid reporting and the debunking of misinformation is more important than ever. She first experienced the power of social media a decade ago when she turned to Instagram to post some of her Michael Brown reporting that didn’t make it on TV.
“When I was a local TV news anchor, I knew that my peers were not watching me on TV,” Noble says. “So my thing was, how do I get this information to the people that need it, and how do we make it something that they want to be a part of? And so for me, switching to digital was a no-brainer, because we all have our phones in our hands. We’re all on YouTube, and we’re all quickly pulling things up that matter to us.”
In 2014, at the height of the Brown demonstrations, “I used Instagram to actually record his mother’s plea. And it blew up on social media. And so I’m like, OK, well, this is a way that we really can reach the masses with news in real time.”
“Roland Martin Unfiltered,” which debuted as a stand-alone series in 2018, offers a robust daily discussion of news, politics and opinion on subjects relevant to disparate Black communities. It features a steady stream of panelists who debate and offer sharp commentary. Noble’s noontime live stream, which is also archived for on-demand viewing via YouTube and the Black Star platform, is more in the just-the-facts mode. She does conduct one-on-one extended interviews but she approaches them with an anchor’s remove.
“I’m not a commentator. I’m more of a news anchor that’s just here to present the facts and to be unbiased, so I do not look to include the panelists,” Noble says. “My last segment on the show is ‘For the Culture.’ Are you an entrepreneur? Are you an author? Do you need our attention? Like we want whatever it is for the culture,” she says.
Noble’s goal is to make “The Breakdown” as inclusive for Black communities as possible especially at a time of civil rights rollbacks, anti-DEI campaigns and efforts to stem the progress achieved over centuries.
“I want this show to be a community effort. I want the community to get involved. If you’re an expert, if you have research that we need to know, please share that with us,” Noble says. “If you have a new story that you want to us to look into, or you think that deserves the spotlight, please send it in to us.”
As she begins her second week at her own anchor desk, Noble admits to “still kind of being in shock that I’ve been elevated to this type of level, and to be able to share news,” she says. “This is something I’ve always dreamed of, and to be actually doing it is truly surreal.”
Noble is quick to emphasize her respect and appreciation for the platform that Martin has built, starting with “Roland Martin Unfiltered.” The show debuted on YouTube and other social platforms in 2018 after the indie cable outlet TV One tabled its news division, which had been led by Martin.
“When he started Black Star Network, he said to me and he said it to other journalists at NABJ that he was building this for us. And we didn’t believe it,” Noble says. “We didn’t understand it.”
Now, as she prepares for week two of “The Breakdown,” Noble already has a visceral sense of the vitality of independent journalism presented in a modern, accessible format.
“I’m not just in Tennessee or reporting for viewers in Indianapolis or St. Louis or in many other cities that I’ve worked in. Now, it doesn’t matter where you are, it doesn’t matter where you live, this is something you can turn on and take information away from it,” she says.
English (US) ·