Published: November 26, 2004 10:00 AM ET
CHICAGO Nervous laughter echoed from the audience of movers and shakers gathered at a DuSable Museum reception this summer to formally welcome Roland S. Martin as the new executive editor of the Chicago Defender. On stage, Cliff Kelley, the most influential talk radio host in black Chicago, was kidding on the square with Real Times LLC Chairman Tom Picou about the awful quality of the African-American daily not so long ago.
"I used to tell him that I had a great slogan for the Defender: 'Yesterday's News Tomorrow,'" Kelley laughed, as Picou, who years ago was the paper's president under its old Sengstacke family ownership, tried to look like a good sport. "There was a reason we called it 'the Offender.' We used to ask him if they had any proofreaders on the paper. We'd say, 'Ebonics was invented at the Defender.' It didn't seem like the paper could get worse, and then, things got worse."
By January 2003, when the Real Times group of investors from Chicago and Detroit bought the Defender and its four sibling weeklies for $8.1 million from the Sengstacke family, the Chicago paper had been surviving for decades as a shadow of its former self in editorial quality, readership, and financial viability. In the early 1950s, the weekly Defender circulated nationwide and hit its peak sales of 230,000 copies. In 2002, the last time it filed an Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) Publisher's Statement, the daily Defender sold just 14,629 copies a day in a city of 1.1 million African-Americans.
The decline of the storied newspaper — once so powerful it is credited with setting off the Great Migration of African-Americans from Dixie to the industrial cities of the North after World War I — symbolized the state of many black papers across the nation. Too many markets were crowded with black newspapers that were thinly financed mom-and- pop operations competing for readers and advertisers with error-riddled, irrelevant articles presented in dated layouts and smudgy reproduction.
But now, the black press is on a rebound, pushed by a sophisticated readership increasingly loathe to accept mediocrity, pulled by owners who realize their old business model is utterly broken and advertisers who now demand a more specific return on their dollar than a feel-good vibe.
"The black press has gotten the memo that change is required," says DC Livers, who catalogued more than 400 black newspapers and other publications as editor of the new Black Press Yearbook: Who's Who in Black Media. "They're starting to understand that their reader ... expects the black press to be as good as the general market [paper]."
Robert W. Bogle has seen the changes firsthand as president and CEO of the nation's oldest black newspaper, the 120-year-old Philadelphia Tribune. "Being black," he says, "won't get you over — and it shouldn't. You've got to be competitive."
And just as the Defender symbolized an industry in trouble, the paper now is the most talked-about example of a possible black-press renaissance.