Photo by Bobby Quillard
Yanick Rice Lamb and Sheree Crute are co-founders of FierceforBlackWomen.com. As publisher, Yanick is involved in all aspects of the company and oversees business and strategic development. Lamb has worked on launches of magazines, websites and Styles of the Times, now known as Sunday Styles, at the New York Times. She has an MBA and extensive digital journalism, social media and business experience.
Career Highlights
An award-winning journalist and author, Yanick is an professor and former chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University. She was also associate publisher and editorial director of Heart & Soul magazine, the leading health and fitness magazine targeted to African-American women. Yanick served at the helm twice, under three owners. In both cases, she successfully re-launched and repositioned the magazine. She was asked to return the second time to resurrect the magazine from bankruptcy and a two-year hiatus. Maximizing limited resources, she effectively implemented a virtual operation for editorial, art direction and production with core team members working in several states across the country.
As founding editor of BET Weekend, Yanick’s editorial vision fueled the magazine’s popularity and led to it becoming the second-largest publication targeted to African Americans. Under her leadership, circulation increased nearly 40 percent, from 800,000 to 1.3 million in three years. She was also an editor-at-large and filled in as executive editor at Essence.
Previously, Yanick worked for the New York Times Company for 10 years in various newspaper roles, including assistant style editor, deputy home and living editor, assistant editor of Connecticut Weekly, metropolitan copy editor and a layout editor on the news desk as well as senior editor for health and education at Child magazine. She was also a copy editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a reporter at The Toledo Blade.
A recipient of McDonald’s Black History Maker of Today Award in Journalism, she and her staffs have won numerous editorial and design awards, including awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, a Folio: Editorial Excellence Award, several Unity Awards and multiple Salute to Excellence Awards from the National Association of Black Journalists. As a Health Performance Fellow sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Commonwealth Fund, she investigated long-term care of the uninsured. She wrote an award-winning, in-depth piece on dementia as the John A. Hartford/MetLife Foundation Journalism in Aging & Health Fellow, and has participated in National Press Foundation fellowships on Alzheimer’s and cancer issues.
Yanick is co-author of Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson (Wiley 2004), Rise & Fly: Tall Tales and Mostly True Rules of Bid Whist (Random House/Crown, 2005) and The Spirit of African Design (Clarkson/Potter, 1996). She was a contributor to Health & Healing for African-Americans (Rodale, 1997); BET on Black: African-American Women Celebrate Fatherhood in the Age of Barack Obama (Kimani, 2013), Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (Peter Lang, 2008), Haternation: How Incivility & Racism Have Divided Us (Smashwords, 2012), Social Media: Pedagogy and Practice (Peter Lang, 2013), Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother (Ballantine Books, 2004); and Sisterfriend Soul Journeys (PromoTrends, 2000). She is completing her debut novel, Nursing Wounds.
A native of Akron, Ohio, Yanick holds a bachelor’s in journalism from The Ohio State University and an MBA from Howard University, specializing in media management and marketing. She is also completing a doctorate in medical sociology at Howard.
