The storm clouds are hovering over the nation’s African-American newspapers. Once they were local pillars, now many are struggling to stay relevant.
The crusading Chicago Defender published 94 years of African-American history one day at a time. The paper was banned in Southern towns for urging blacks to move north in the 1930s.
The paper reported stories blacks considered major news even when it was not so major to the mainstream press. It hired black reporters and writers when other Chicago papers did not. It is now a paper struggling to stay alive and report in its second century.
Sixty-year-old June Siggers has been reading the Defender since she was 10. Now she performs a vanishing ritual, picking up a daily copy at the newsstand.
Ms. Siggers symbolizes the Defender’s strength and weakness, an aging core of dedicated readers loyal to the paper because of its legacy but unable to interest younger African-Americans in its current edition.
It’s a generation now finding out about black America from TV and mainstream papers who now hire African-American reporters. This competition has shrunk the Defender’s circulation to a mere 25,000, which is down from its peak of 200,000 in the 1940s.
The last remaining black daily in America is for sale in a shadow of its proud heritage.
Successful black newspapers are changing their focus from the crusades of old. One of the most successful is the Philadelphia Tribune. Published four days a week, the Tribune has become less a crusading paper and now focuses its reporting on broader stories designed to interest new readers.
Tribune president Robert Bogle says some failing black newspapers have not changed with the times.
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