Our Time Press, the most widely read and distributed Black-owned and operated weekly newspaper in Brooklyn, New York, was born in a Fort Greene-Clinton Hill brownstone in December 1995. Co-founded by David Mark Greaves and Bernice Elizabeth Green, the publication focuses on local, national, and global issues affecting communities of color in Brooklyn and beyond.
The weekly’s success is entrenched in Green and Greaves’s personal and shared experiences, respective multi-media careers, and joint interests in solutions journalism.
Our Time Press
Greaves, an entrepreneur, author, and former filmmaker, began DBG Media as a DBA and converted it to DBG Media, Publishers of Our Time Press, Inc., in 2008. Green, marketing strategist and features curator for the paper, brings to the paper a wealth of experience in corporate media communications and community voluntarism to DBG Media’s fold.
Bernice and David met in junior high school and credited the impact of their teachers in those early years for their award-winning gifts in growing Our Time Press from the initial print run of 11,000 leaflets to a tabloid that was first monthly, then biweekly and now is printing 20,000 copies a week to a readership of more than 50,000. The publication reaches Central Brooklyn schools, churches, restaurants, organizations, businesses, and more.
In a story entitled “Amsterdam News’ New Generation” (February 13, 1999), journalist Amy Waldman noted a “host of new competitors.” That list included Black Star News, KIP Business Report, The New York World, and Our Time Press. About Our Time Press, Waldman wrote: “The scoop: He left his job as a project manager for a moving company; she left hers in media relations at CBS. ‘We felt there was a lot of information the African American community wasn’t getting,’ Mr. Greaves said. The couple operates off a computer and out of a Clinton Hill storefront, covering issues from multilateral trade agreements to local Black history”
For three decades, the publication has been tempered by the couple’s unique shared and personal experiences growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They attended churches and public schools, including Nathaniel Macon JHS (now David Ruggles), where they met in the 7th grade.
The paper has won numerous journalism and community awards from many media organizations and non-profits, including the New York Association of Black Journalists, the New York Independent Press Association, Bedford Stuyvesant Community Legal Services, Restoration Safe Haven, and many others.
The couple’s other shared achievements include documentaries: their interviews were a regular feature titled “Other Worlds” on Brooklyn Cable Access Television for one year; a fictional 20-minute short “Yes, Dear, which also aired on BCAT;” and producing other projects like the popular, award-winning “…And Call Her Blessed: A Portrait of Janie,” a short tribute to their mentor, the late community activist Janie Green, Bernice’s mother.