When Jeremy Kofi reached out to Eric Keith for his Jeremy Kofi Convo series, he had a simple goal: sit down with the man behind one of the most intentional Black media platforms in the country and have a real conversation.
What unfolded was something far more layered, a nearly hour-long exchange about identity, Black masculinity, media responsibility, entrepreneurship, and what it actually costs a Black man to build something meaningful in public.
The episode, titled More Than a Magazine: The Responsibility of Telling Our Stories, is exactly what it sounds like. Keith, founder, editor-in-chief, and driving force behind The Quintessential Gentleman, doesn’t do surface-level conversations. And in this one, sitting across from Kofi in Los Angeles, he didn’t hold back on any of it.
The Quintessential Gentleman launched in 2016 out of a very specific frustration. Keith, born in Philadelphia and raised in South Jersey, saw a consistent gap in how Black men were being represented in media, not just the absence of positive images, but the active promotion of reductive ones.
At a time when viral footage of Black men being killed by police was spreading across social media and the dominant narrative around Black fatherhood was one of absence, Keith created a platform specifically designed to counter that. “I always say that The Quintessential Gentleman is a luxury brand,” he tells Kofi. “I love to show us in a different light than what’s being depicted.”
What began as a blog became a full editorial platform, and over the past decade it has grown into something Keith himself describes as a news station for Black men, covering entertainment, politics, lifestyle, and culture with the kind of care and intentionality that he says is still largely missing from mainstream media.
The platform has featured conversations with Jermaine Dupri, Charlamagne Tha God, Swizz Beatz, David Alan Grier, and political figures including mayors of Atlanta and Baltimore. None of it was accidental.
In the conversation, Keith talks about the anxiety that comes with running something this personal, the habit of turning his phone off every time a new cover drops because he can’t face the response, the perfectionism that makes him see flaws in work that everyone else sees as exceptional, and the internal rewiring required to trust a team with a vision he built alone.
He also opens up about the moment the pandemic changed everything about how he approached QG’s editorial mission, the shift from intentionally avoiding negative news to realizing that silence was a form of complicity. “By not saying anything, I’m complicit,” he says directly.
The conversation moves through the challenges facing Black media broadly: underfunding, the advertising dollars that consistently bypass Black-owned platforms despite their cultural impact, and the growing threat of AI pulling traffic away from independent outlets before they ever see the benefit of it.
Keith is direct about all of it, and direct about why he keeps going anyway. “You have to be a certain level of delusional or crazy to continue to move in this space,” he says.
Kofi, who is in law school while simultaneously building his own platform, brings a rare kind of peer energy to the conversation, someone who genuinely respects what Keith has built and wants to understand the full weight of it. Their exchange on Black political engagement, diaspora tensions, the responsibility of media in an era of misinformation, and what it means to define a “quintessential gentleman” is the kind of conversation that rewards every minute of its runtime.
“A quintessential gentleman,” Keith says near the end, “is a man who is actively choosing to be a better person than he was yesterday.” That definition, aspirational, inclusive, unfinished, is the best summary of what this platform has always been, and what this conversation captures so well.
The full episode of The Jeremy Kofi Convo is available now. Watch it.
