Former Essence Leader Held Job 2 Years
. . . De Luca Says It Was Her Decision to Leave
Journalists Settle Lawsuit Over Arrests in D.C.
Justice Dept. Warns Localities on Gouging the Poor
A.P. Reporters Witness Africans’ Perilous Journey
After Firing From CNN, Lemon Says He’s ‘Resilient’
Homepage photo: Root 100 2022 (Credit: Jaze Uries)
Updated April 28
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Vanessa De Luca hosted this 2021 discussion for the Root Institute on “The Media Coverage of the Black Community” with “Errin Haines (The 19th), April Reign (#OscarsSoWhite) and Angela Rye (Impact Strategies).” (Credit: YouTube)
Former Essence Leader Held Job 2 Years
Vanessa K. De Luca has left The Root after two years as editor-in-chief, and owner G/O Media has advertised for her successor.
“Vanessa left the company. We wish her well. Tatsha Robertson is now Acting Editor in Chief,” Mark Neschis, head of corporate communications for G/O Media, messaged Journal-isms Thursday. “That’s all I can share at this point.”
De Luca (pictured) did not address the departure publicly nor respond to an inquiry. Emails sent to De Luca’s email address at The Root are returned with, “We’re sorry Vanessa is no longer working at G/O Media,” and her LinkedIn profile says, “She recently served as Editor In Chief of The Root.”
Robertson (pictured), who assumes the role of acting top editor, describes herself on LinkedIn as: “Multimedia journalist, investigative writer-editor, adjunct professor, author and ghostwriter for major publishers: Benbella, Harper Collins and Little Brown.
“With 25 years in publishing, I’ve handled print, digital, long-term projects and features for People Magazine, Essence, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune and other publications.
“I forged strategic sources with the former White House and built visibility with appearances on national media outlets. I founded two blogs, coauthored a major education book and ghosted two books in 2019 and 2020.”
De Luca, editor-in-chief of Essence magazine from 2013 to 2018, arrived in 2021 as the seventh editorial leader of The Root, established in 2008 by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and then-Washington Post publisher Donald Graham. She followed Danielle Belton, who became editor-in-chief of HuffPost, and immediately encountered a backlash from staffers as she shifted the site to a more family-friendly direction.
Over “the past year, 15 of the site’s employees have left — a nearly 100 percent turnover since April, when it had 16 full-time staffers,” Tarpley Hitt wrote in January 2022 for Gawker.
“The departures included: editor-in-chief Danielle Belton; managing editor Genetta Adams; news editor Monique Judge; social media editor Corey Townsend; editor Maiysha Kai; video producers Felice Leon, Jessica Moulite, and PJ Rickards; writers, Tonja Renée Stidhum, Joe Jurado, Terrell Jermaine Starr, Stephen Crockett Jr., and Michael Harriot; and the two founders of Very Smart Brothas, the popular blog that The Root acquired in 2017, Damon Young and Panama Jackson.
“Harriot, who resigned in November, told Gawker: ‘As a staff, we came to the conclusion that, basically, The Root is over.’”
The Gawker piece followed one from Aja Hannah for the Pivot Fund in December 2021. “On its homepage, it can be seen that the content of The Root has strayed from news and Black opinion to entertainment,” Hannah wrote.
“Before April 2021, the featured stories were news, opinion, and race matters. Today, much of the headline content is fashion, music, entertainment, and television. Utilizing the Wayback Machine, it can be seen that the navigation bar changed to include Culture and Entertainment on May 28, 2021. Very Smart Brothas was pushed to the end of the bar. At a later date, the Beauty/Style tab was also added. . . .”
Many stories were rewrites of pieces from other media. The Gawker account reported, “Eight former and current Root staffers told Gawker that management seemed to want less of the overtly provocative work its writers were known for in favor of ‘a softer, gentler, more upbeat site,’ with an emphasis on entertainment, fewer swear words, a blurrier relationship with advertisers, and stories like, as one source put it: ‘This Girl Applied For 17 Scholarships And Got Into Three Ivy League Schools.’ “
The most prominent stories on Thursday’s site were, “I Still Can’t Believe What Jimmy Butler Just Did to the Milwaukee Bucks,” “Don Lemon Reveals His Post-CNN Plans, and Honestly, They Aren’t Bad,” and “A Great Writing Hack That’ll Get Your Dream Book Published.”
In March, Journal-isms asked the Comscore research company for the number of unique visitors that leading Black-oriented websites attracted in 2022. TheRoot.com recorded 2,428,000, down 36 percent from the previous year. It was No. 8 on the list. In 2017, the last year Comscore conducted such a survey, the site was No. 3.
When Jim Rich, then editorial director at G/O Media, hired De Luca in 2021, he said, “Vanessa is a proven leader who has run major editorial operations covering the African American experience in the US. She is a smart, innovative editor who I am confident will maintain and grow The Root’s position in the industry, and with her guidance,
take the brand to new levels of success.”
In the midst of the staff dissatisfaction, De Luca tweeted in October 2021, “If y’all only knew how many people i have outlasted, you wouldn’t try me. #resilienceisaverb.”
- Julia Moskin and Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times: Dawn Davis Resigns as Bon Appétit Editor to Rejoin Simon & Schuster
. . . De Luca Says It Was Her Decision to Leave
(April 28 update) After the above posting, Vanessa K. De Luca took to Instagram to respond. She apparently hadn’t checked her Twitter messages, where we have communicated previously, to see the attempt to reach her there as well as by email, where the account supplied no forwarding address.
“Ahem …. Taking a brief moment from reclaiming my time to reframe the narrative surrounding my recent departure from The Root, because this article leaves out a few details:
“– it was my decision to leave after two years; I have always had a knack for knowing when it’s time to move on.
“– the split was amicable, despite all the past drama that was dredged up about what happened when I first joined the website, which has nothing to do with my current status. Also, it is very easy to reach me for comment beyond sending a query to a work email that has been disabled.
“– my decision is about self-care, something Black women don’t often get the opportunity to honestly admit that we need. We soldier on and push through, and we foster our own self-destruction in the process. This is my attempt to break that cycle.
-“- If anyone needs encouragement to do the same, DM me. This is about to become a movement, :-)”
Journalists Settle Lawsuit Over Arrests in D.C.
“The D.C. government agreed to pay $175,000 to two journalists to settle a lawsuit that alleged police unlawfully detained the pair while they were covering demonstrations and vandalism in downtown Washington during Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2017,” Keith L. Alexander reported Wednesday for the Washington Post.
The two are Aarón Cantú (pictured), a Latino journalist then at the Santa Fe (N.M.) Reporter who has written about policing, propaganda, drugs and politics for the Intercept, Al Jazeera and other publications, and Colorado-based photojournalist Alexei Wood. A spokesman for the journalists announced Tuesday that the two would split the settlement, minus attorney fees. Both were arrested and charged with rioting and other counts; Wood was acquitted at trial, and prosecutors later dropped the charges against Cantú.
“In all, 234 people were arrested during the unrest on the Inauguration Day in downtown D.C. Authorities alleged that demonstrators caused about $100,000 of property damage across many blocks downtown, shattering windows on businesses and vehicles. Police, in turn, rounded up people en masse and fired pepper spray and other less-lethal munitions,” Alexander wrote.
“Twenty-one of the 234 defendants pleaded guilty before trial — the only convictions arising from the arrests. A handful fought their charges, resulting in acquittals or hung juries. Charges against the others were eventually dropped after prosecutors struggled to tie defendants to specific damage of businesses, vehicles and other property. . . .”
On Feb. 27, 2017, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent a letter to then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Channing D. Phillips, in support of Cantú.
The letter argued that Cantú, who now writes for the Los Angeles-based publication Capital & Main, is clearly a journalist and questioned why a journalist faces indictment when he appears to have been covering the protest at the time of his arrest. [PDF]
In 2020, with the case still alive, Cantu said in a written statement, “I’m still very angry about what happened to me, Alexei, and hundreds of others, but I’m trying to channel this anger constructively by attempting to hold D.C. police accountable. Unfortunately, because of the immense power courts grant police, this isn’t the first time D.C. police have been sued for outrageous conduct at public protests and I doubt it will be the last time.”
Justice Dept. Warns Localities on Gouging the Poor
Since the uprising in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, a Black man, journalists have reported that one of the underlying frustrations in that city and others was the levying of unnecessary fines on poor people to balance the budget.
A year later, the Justice Department, under Attorney General Eric Holder, found that the Ferguson Police Department and the city’s municipal court engaged in a “pattern and practice” of discrimination against African Americans. They were targeted disproportionately for traffic stops, use of force and jail sentences.
In 2021, Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote “Profit and Punishment: How American Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice.” The book examined the issue as a national one. Moreover, “What is particularly new since Ferguson is the ‘pay-to-stay’ phenomenon, where poor people are jailed for their inability to pay for ‘board bills’ or bills for previous stays in jail,” Messenger told Journal-isms then.
In February, the George Polk Award for local reporting went to a team of journalists from Alabama’s AL.com. Their reporting “revealed how the police force in Brookside, a town of 1,253 people, used proceeds from fines for nefarious citations and arrests and forfeitures to bilk poor residents of thousands of dollars, increasing revenue by 640 percent over two years. The police chief, his top lieutenant and more than half of the force resigned or were forced out within two weeks of AL.com’s initial story,” Al.com reported.
Now the Justice Department is ratcheting up its attention. Associate Attorney Vanita Gupta (pictured), the No. 3 person in the department, “sent a memo to the nation’s judges . . . that warned against imposing high fees and fines that would unfairly burden low-income people,” Perry Stein reported April 22 for The Washington Post.
“A day later, top officials at the agency celebrated several people who have received pardons and clemencies in recent years, characterizing their long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes as harsh and unfair.
“Both efforts were part of the Biden administration’s campaign to address what Justice Department officials describe as systemic failings in the justice system that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color.
“ ‘Imposing and enforcing fines and fees on individuals who cannot afford to pay them has been shown to cause profound harm,’ officials wrote in the ‘Letter to Colleagues’ memo this week, which warned that harsh financial penalties that trap people in poverty could be unconstitutional. . . .”
- AL.com: AL.com journalists win Hillman Prize for reporting on policing in Brookside
- Tony Messenger, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The feds tell judges to stop trampling on the civil rights of poor people (May 3)
- Dana Reick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Maplewood settles debtor’s prison suit for $3.25 million. ‘We got treated bad.’ (April 11)
- Glenn Thrush, New York Times: Justice Dept. Presses Local Courts to Reduce Fines
Authorities in Tunisia have intercepted migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and have stopped 372 people in just 14 hours using speedboats. The Associated Press followed the National Guard on patrol near Sfax, Tunisia. ((AP Video/Mehdi El Arem, via YouTube.)
A.P. Reporters Witness Africans’ Perilous Journey
“A young man wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with ‘Dior,’ women clutching babies wrapped in blankets, children bundled in winter coats. All gingerly stepped from rickety boats into the sturdy craft of the Tunisian Maritime National Guard — and away from their dreams of life in Europe,” Mehdi El-Arem and Elaine Ganley reported Thursday for the Associated Press, their story generously illustrated with photographs.
“Cold, wet and heartbroken, they are among hundreds caught daily in overnight sweeps for migrant boats on the Mediterranean Sea.
“Many sub-Saharan Africans looked toward Europe as a getaway.
“ ‘Sit down! Sit down! Sit down!’ The shouted order confirmed the group was no longer in charge of their destiny. A woman sobbed.
“On an overnight expedition with the National Guard last week, The Associated Press witnessed migrants pleading to continue their journeys to Italy in unseaworthy vessels, some taking on water. Over 14 hours, 372 people were plucked from the fragile boats.
“Migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are undertaking the perilous journey in unprecedented numbers. In the first three months of this year, 13,000 migrants were forced from their boats off the eastern Tunisian port city of Sfax, the main launching point. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of migrants heading to Europe, mostly to Italy but also to Malta, nearly doubled. . . .”
El-Arem and Ganley also wrote, “Each night, National Guard vessels comb the waters. Pulling up the dead is the grimmest part of the job. The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights said that 580 migrants died or disappeared at sea in 2022. . . .
“Sub-Saharan Africans, some living illegally in Tunisia for years and working at low wages, began trying to make a quick exit after Tunisia’s increasingly authoritarian President Kais Saied demanded urgent measures in February to crack down on Black Africans, claiming they are part of a plot to erase his country’s identity. Some countries airlifted their citizens back home.
“Many sub-Saharan Africans looked toward Europe as a getaway.
“ ‘If a Black man does something bad in Tunisia, then Tunisians see us all as bad and chase us away,’ said a man from Ivory Coast who refused to give his name over concerns about the tense situation for Black Africans in Tunisia. ‘It’s not logical. We are all humans.’ . . . ”
After Firing From CNN, Lemon Says He’s ‘Resilient’
“When life gives you lemons …
“Don Lemon swears he’s not angry after being unceremoniously ousted from CNN earlier this week,” Nicki Gostin reported Wednesday for the New York Post’s Page Six.
“ ‘It’s not in my nature,’ the journalist, 57, told Page Six exclusively at the TIME 100 gala on Wednesday night. ‘I’m not an angry person, I’m not mad.’
“Despite tweeting that he was ‘stunned’ by his abrupt dismissal, Lemon claimed that he’s no longer in shock.
“ ‘I’m a very resilient person,’ he explained.
“ ‘I’ve had a very full life with lots of twists and turns. I come from strong, sturdy stock in Louisiana and I am lucky enough to be in a position where I don’t have to worry about, you know, not having a place to live or a home or whatever.’ . . . ”
Samantha Agate reported Monday for Yahoo.com, “Lemon has an estimated net worth of $12 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He also earned a salary estimated to be around $4 million from his contributions to CNN each year.” (Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock)
Belafonte Wanted More From Black Journalists
April 25, 2023
Activist-Artist Homed In on Commentary
Grandson Says Media Stoked Fear in Shooter, 84
Homepage photo: Harry Belafonte in New York, 2011. (Credit: Mark Seliger/ Management + artists)
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Activist-Artist Homed In on Commentary
Harry Belafonte, the giant of a self-described “activist who became an artist,” didn’t think that opinion writing by Black journalists on the Black community was “really and truly worthy of the embrace of those who grade commentary.”
At least that’s what Belafonte, who died Tuesday at 96 of congestive heart failure, told Journal-isms in 2005 as journalism awards named after his assassinated friend Robert F. Kennedy were bestowed.
Rare was the journalist of color who went to the stage to claim an award from “the largest single program honoring outstanding reporting on the problems of the disadvantaged.”
Belafonte sat on the RFK Memorial board. He said then that the demographics of the winners are “something we are constantly alerted to when we sit,” and that, “certainly, the work we do is deeply rooted in the voices of the people you see absent here.”
But he added, “I’m not sure that the commentary on the Black community by Blacks is really and truly worthy of the embrace of those who grade commentary. I don’t see it in the harvest and the abundance that we should be seeing it.
“There are sprinkles; what I don’t see is the flood,” Belafonte continued. Among the sprinkles, the New York-based Belafonte named columnist Bob Herbert of The New York Times as “way out in front,’ and” broadcast commentator Tavis Smiley.
Although the RFK awards don’t single out commentary, this columnist offered to set up a meeting with Belafonte and the Trotter Group, the national association of African American columnists that included such uncompromising New York-area commentators as the late Les Payne.
Belafonte agreed and provided his office number. But when we attempted to follow up, we never heard from Belafonte again. As it turned out, Belafonte and the Trotter Group would be in Atlanta at the same time that summer, as the National Association of Black Journalists met there.
Apparently, Belafonte had said all he wanted to on the subject.
The news media were part of the engine that boosted Belafonte to the top in the 1950s as a singer of Americanized calypso tunes, as an actor and as an activist.
In most cases the news media were followers, not leaders in pushing Belafonte to the top. Entertainment media played more of a role. The news media didn’t rate much of a mention in the artist’s 2011 memoir, co-author Michael Shnayerson confirmed for Journal-isms Tuesday.
Harry Belafonte sat down with journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault for the “PBS News Hour” in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Belafonte remembered how he and King met and explained why he believed the United States was more racially divided than any other moment in his life. (Credit: PBS/YouTube)
Yet “My Song: A Memoir” mentions the profiles in the era’s widely read magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life and, of course, Ebony. Publications named Belafonte one of the top three Black entertainers in the country and “America’s Negro Matinee Idol.”
For the adventurous and curious, massive scrapbooks of Belafonte’s press coverage from the 1940s, through the civil rights movement into the 1970s and beyond, are housed at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Schomburg acquired Belafonte’s personal archives in 2020.
Not that all of the press was adoring. On Tuesday, the New York Amsterdam News, a pillar of the Black press, posted two stories and a video.
But in 1957, the paper ran the headline, “BELAFONTE WEDS WHITE DANCER,” and cited in its story a saying from the 1920s, “Give a Negro man fame and fortune, and he’s got to have a white woman, a Packard car, and a bulldog,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalled in his 1997 book, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.” The reference was to Julie Robinson, the only white dancer in the Katherine Dunham Company. Gates wrote that Robinson “knew a lot more about African and African American folk culture than Belafonte did.”
Gates also wrote that Belafonte recalled for him a news conference “where a Trinidadian journalist berated him for styling himself King of Calypso when he had never been to Trinidad, home of the art form, and had no contact with its traditions.
“Belafonte replied that he had no control over how his record label promoted him, and conceded that he wasn’t really a calypso singer. ‘And then I said, “I’ll tell you, though, that I find that most of the culture coming out of Trinidad among calypso singers is not in the best interests of the people of the Caribbean community. I think that it’s racist, because you sing to our own denunciation on color. You sing about our sexual power, and our gift of drinking, and rape, and all the things we do to which I have, and want, no particular claim.
“What I have sought to do with my art is take my understanding of the region and put it before people in a positive way. And doing these songs gives people another impression than the mythology they have that we’re all lazy, living out of a banana tree, f—ing each other to death.'”
He was also unapologetic about Americanizing his calypso. “There were great calypsonians who could never see the light of day in this country, because they were so distanced from this culture. Now I came along and I modified the dialect. I put it into a rhythm that was more closely identified with the American scene. If, instead, I came in and sang this stuff with a thick Jamaican accent, it would have been like listening to Italian opera.”
Belafonte used his knowledge of media to maximum effect during the 1963 March on Washington, where his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Belafonte directed the celebrities on where to sit to be in prime camera range.
Black journalists weren’t the only objects of Belafonte’s disappointment for what he contended was letting down the struggle.
In 2013, he was asked, “Are you happy with the image of members of minorities in Hollywood today?”
“Not at all,” Belafonte replied. “They have not told the history of our people, nothing of who we are. We are still looking. … And I think one of the great abuses of this modern time is that we should have had such high-profile artists, powerful celebrities. But they have turned their back on social responsibility. That goes for Jay-Z and Beyoncé, for example. Give me Bruce Springsteen (pictured), and now you’re talking. I really think he is Black.”
Belafonte and Jay-Z eventually reached an accommodation.
As for Black journalists, while Belafonte declined in 2005 to engage with those he accused of being insufficiently conscious, he did acknowledge in a follow-up conversation that the RFK organization — and he — needed to conduct more outreach to find the work that journalists of color are doing along the lines he discussed.
Meanwhile, Belafonte took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to show what he meant.
In 2002, he “denounced Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a radio interview . . . likening him to a plantation slave who abandoned his principles to ‘come into the house of the master.’ Mr. Powell called the characterization ‘unfortunate,’ ” as Todd S. Purdham reported then for The New York Times.
In 2016, when Donald Trump first ran for president, Belafonte wrote an op-ed for the Times that resonates today.
It began by quoting poet Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again.”
“Mr. Trump, who is not a poet, either in his late-night tweets or on the speaker’s stump, sees American greatness as some heavy, dead thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold, perhaps, or a bank vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves to put up,” Belafonte wrote.
“It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the American experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to ‘winning’ without ever spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion of ‘others,’ the reduction of women to sexual tally points, the re-closeting of so many of us.
“With his simple, mean, boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration that is not possible and could not be endured if it were. Many of his followers acknowledge that (‘He may get us all killed’) but want to have someone in the White House who will really ‘blow things up.’
“What old men know is that things blown up — customs, folkways, social compacts, human bodies — cannot so easily be put right. What Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that America be America again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle, not the vaporous fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.”
- Wil Haygood, Washington Post: Harry Belafonte’s biggest hit? The song of freedom.
- Craig Jenkins, Vulture/New York: Harry Belafonte Dragged Us Into the Future| The late legend ditched stardom for something far greater. (April 26)
- Roy S. Johnson, al.com: Onward, Harry Belafonte (April 27)
- Journal-isms: Poitier Loved Journalists, Except When He Didn’t (Jan. 9, 2022)
- Stephanie Kaloi, People: Harry Belafonte’s Family: Remembering the Legend’s Life With His Spouses and Kids
- Lisa Keys, Times of Israel: Harry Belafonte, who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96 (April 26)
- Lord Melody, YouTube: Booboo Man / Mama Look a Boo Boo (first recorded 1955)
- Victoria Uwumarogie, Essence: Photos Of Harry Belafonte And His Children Over The Years
Grandson Says Media Stoked Fear in Shooter, 84
“When Klint Ludwig learned his grandfather, a White homeowner in Kansas City, had shot a Black teenager who rang his doorbell, Ludwig was repulsed — but not entirely surprised,” Holly Yan reported Friday for CNN.
“ ‘The warning signs were there. I wasn’t shocked when I heard the news,’ ” about 84-year-old Andrew Lester, Ludwig told CNN on Thursday. ” ‘I believe he held – holds – racist tendencies and beliefs.’ “
Yan also wrote, “Klint Ludwig said he was disturbed by racial comments made by his grandfather in the past, including about Black people.
“He said his grandfather believed in right-wing conspiracy theories and was influenced by the ‘fear and paranoia’ stoked by some right-wing media, which was often ‘blaring in his living room.’ . . .
“But Ludwig’s older brother, Daniel, reportedly disputed the notion that race played a role when their grandfather . . . shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in front of his door on April 13.
“ ‘I was disgusted. I thought it was terrible. We – myself and my family – stand with Ralph Yarl in seeking justice,’ Klint Ludwig said. ‘This is a horrible tragedy that never should have happened.’
“When asked why he decided to speak out against his grandfather, he replied, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’
“Too often in the US, the younger brother said, ‘people get away with killing unarmed, innocent Black people.’
“ ‘People need to speak out,’ he said, ‘not make any excuses for this kind of behavior and this violence.’ . . . ”
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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity. Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms+owner@
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