Jonathan Rabb

Jonathan Rabb is a journalist and entrepreneur. After researching digital audience development as a Fulbright journalism grantee, he founded Watch The Yard, a digital platform for Black college students and alumni to tell authentic stories about, with and for the Black community. Reaching over 15 million people monthly, as the center for Black college culture and Black fraternity and sorority news, the NAACP has called the Watch The Yard a “central digital voice for today’s Black experience.”

Jonathan has led Watch The Yard to establish some momentous partnerships spanning the White House, The U.S. Census, the State Department and the UNCF all the way to Meta, Google, and Walmart, helping organizations reach its community of college-educated Black people. Because of its reach and impact in the Black community, Watch The Yard was named an official streaming partner of the 2021 Presidential Inauguration.

In 2016, after being motivated by his own reporting on stories of racist, xenophobic, homophobic violence, Rabb founded ClutchSOS, a security app at the intersection of tech and activism that is now serving his South Minneapolis community in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
As a response to the pandemic in 2020 and Black college students losing internship opportunities because of it, Jonthan created YARDCON, a job conference for Black college students at HBCUs and PWIs. The digital conference has grown and has been attended by thousands of Black students representing over 700 different colleges and universities across the nation. This Fall, YARDCON will be hosted in person on an HBCU campus.
Dedicated to the future of storytelling and journalism, Jonathan recently completed two back-to-back Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University where he researched the creation of sustainable minority-owned news platforms. In the past, he has worked as an on-air host for The CW and a red carpet reporter in Hollywood. Currently he hosts Minnesota Public Radio's "Untangled Roots" podcast exploring race in the midwest.