Soledad O’Brien And Google Team Up for Black in America Tour

Soledad O’Brien and Google are teaming up for the Black in America Tour.

O’Brien’s production company Starfish Media Group will partner with the search engine giant to utilize the Google+ hangouts, YouTube channel, and bring her speaking tour to colleges across the country. The non-exclusive partnership will bring O’Brien a step closer to her goal of making Starfish Media Group a multimedia platform.

The CNN anchor will move her documentary “Black in America” from TV screens to an interactive town hall forum, in which the journalist will discuss race, class, poverty, and wealth in the African-American community. The first stop on the tour will be February 17 at University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. Other dates will be announced soon.

The tour, sponsored by Google, will visit college campuses and art centers for an experience O’Brien hopes “people feel that they are heard and that they are a part of a discussion and conversation that we’ve seen frankly happen online a lot.”

The journalist isn’t a stranger to minority issues, she’s also produced the series”Latino in America,” and she’s not nervous about getting instant feedback from attendees.

“The speaking tour is very different than doing a show, where, you can have momentary jitters about nailing a break, getting to commercial on time, or finishing the interview in four minutes,” she told Huffington Post.

Overall O’Brien says she’ll be successful “if we end up really spurring a great conversation where people feel free.”

Viewers of the popular “Black in America” series shouldn’t be alarmed. O’Brien is producing the next documentary in the series for CNN, while working on other projects for Al Jazeera America and HBO, as well as expanding Starfish Media Group.