Coping with the New Reality

The gap between black income and white income is widening anew. Black unemployment remains double the rate for whites. Most black children still attend largely black schools. But there is no rioting in the streets, the ghettos are not aflame, and, except where busing is an explosive issue, one of the most contentious and compelling stories of the last decade has faded from U.S. front pages. Writes New York Times Editorialist Roger Wilkins in the May issue of Esquire: "When the traumatic upheavals of the Sixties ended, it was easy for whites to retreat once more into the fantasy world in which blacks were not visible, or not important, or both."

As the country's leading black newspaper executives gather in Philadelphia this week for the 36th annual meeting of their National Newspaper Publishers Association, they have a critical question to ponder: Are their enterprises, too, becoming invisible?

Founded in protest and nurtured in militancy, the black press long made a rough and sometimes roisterous contribution to U.S. news reporting. Thirty years ago the Pittsburgh Courier had 23 editions, a circulation of 355,000 and an instinct for the jugular. It once hired a white reporter to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, and conducted a public fund drive to pay Jackie Robinson's travel expenses to Brooklyn after the Dodgers said they were ready to break baseball's color line. The Baltimore-based Afro-American chain told its 154,000 readers what was happening in their communities at a time (as late as 1960) when the first rule impressed upon Baltimore Sun police reporters was: if it happened to blacks it isn't news. The Chicago Defender, when it was a weekly, once had a circulation that topped 200,000; New York City's Amsterdam News had 100,000--figures that far exceeded today's.

White Money. The two most frequently cited causes for the decline of the black press are economics and the brain drain. "The black press today must mostly depend on white advertising," says Psychologist Nathan Hare, former publisher of the militant intellectual magazine Black Scholar. "But it is very difficult to make money and be a voice for black revolution." A National Urban League study of the black press reports that "in 1974 black media received less than 1% of the $13.6 billion in advertising agency billings." With the recent recession hitting their thinly capitalized black advertisers especially hard, even the most successful black publishers find themselves steering more conservative courses than they did in the protest years. Sums up a black Atlanta journalist: "Once a sword for freedom, the black press is now a flaccid instrument."

The harshest charge frequently heard is that the black press is now so steeped in mediocrity that it deserves its troubles. Says John Henrik Clarke, black educator and an editor of the civil rights quarterly Freedom-ways: "It's doing more copying of the white press than creating. Since the civil rights movement, it has collapsed." A perturbed black journalist calls black papers "woefully understaffed and lacking in quality."

The black press no longer can hire and keep the best black talent, which is now keenly sought by white editors. The Chicago Defender pays beginning reporters $164 per week; the Chicago Tribune $288. "Young journalists use us as a training ground," says John Procope, publisher of Amsterdam News. Nor is the black press the sole voice for the black community, which until the '60s it was. Metropolitan dailies now cover some stories of special interest to blacks, as do local television stations. Moreover, the black press has largely abandoned its protest rationale of almost 150 years (the first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published in 1827) without finding a new identity for itself.

But for all their difficulties, the 300 black newspapers in the U.S. still help bridge the gap between white coverage and black reality. Profiles of five of the biggest and most influential:

> The Amsterdam News (circ. 66,000) is the largest nonreligious black weekly (the Muslim Bilalian News, formerly Muhammad Speaks, claims a circulation of 583,000). For most of its 67 years, the Amsterdam News has catered to the middle-class aspirations of Harlem's business and professional people. It is sold 90% on the newsstand, and its blazing red front-page headlines stress crime and gossip. But the rest of its news comes in quieter hues: close attention to black politics, knowledgeable reviews of black art, music and books, a World of Work page that offers stories on the movements of blacks in Government and corporate positions, personality profiles, accounts of business successes.

Its editorial staff numbers only 13 and the paper uses no wire service copy, but it still produces major pieces on controversial subjects. Last year it launched a drive against black crime that, according to Publisher Procope, "wasn't popular because people don't like criticism," and recently it carried a series on rent control that backed the real estate operators. "We caught hell for it, but we got a discussion going," says Procope. A marketing man before taking over in 1974, Procope, 42, believes "the cry of the '70s for blacks is economic development and viability." That is also the cry of his paper. Its circulation is down from 82,000 in 1973, and it suffered major advertising losses in 1975.

> The Chicago Defender (circ. 21,500), one of the country's two black dailies, builds an average 30-page issue around the best national and local coverage of blacks by any paper. It has clout, a creditable news service, and has its stories picked up frequently by Chicago's white dailies. The decision to turn the Defender, founded in 1905, into a daily was made in 1956 by Editor and Publisher John Sengstacke, 63. Since then, his company has grown into one of the hundred largest black businesses in America. (Included in its holdings is the New Pittsburgh Courier, a healthy five-edition remnant of the old Courier, which was in serious financial difficulty when it was acquired in 1966.) After a bad year in 1975, Defender circulation and revenues are up. One big problem common to black urban newspapers: distribution. Dealers in interracial neighborhoods refuse to carry the Defender, and in black areas street gangs rob the newsboys so often that home delivery is not profitable. Says Editorial Director Louis Martin, 63: "Anyone in the black press knows it's not a profit-making thing. We've got a mission."

> The Atlanta World (circ. 19,500), the other black daily, is the fief of a curmudgeon, C.A. Scott, 62, editor, general manager and resident tyrant. Founded in 1928, the World was once the flagship of a chain of papers with a circulation of 80,000. Says Scott: "Man, we were trailblazers. It's only in my old age that I realized what we done." What he is doing now is publishing a well-designed and well-edited paper that espouses a conservative posture that confounds progressive blacks; the World, for example, has never supported a black against a white in a major political race in Atlanta. Scott's reasoning: "Blacks have got to share power. We've got more than we need now." He believes his paper's job is to "create understanding and peace between the races--we're all Americans." To that end he avoids shrillness and controversy. He claims the first priority of the black press today is to set the same standards he does: "Have the highest possible credibility. Get it straight, accurate and honest so people can believe you." He charges a dime for his paper, up five cents in 48 years.

> The Baltimore Afro-American (circ. 28,000) is a semiweekly with regional editions for Washington, Richmond, New Jersey and the rest of the Northeast that bring its circulation up to 93,500. Founded in 1892, it ought to be known as the Murphy paper. Board Chairman John Murphy III, 60, is a third-generation proprietor, and 15 Murphy family members work for him. The Afro serves up rich portions of information on education, careers, consumerism and fashion, is keenly aware of black heritage subjects, carries a great deal of Third World news and has its own photographic morgue. Its generally gentlemanly tone contrasts with a helter-skelter makeup that suggests all the news that fits, it prints. Says Murphy: "An editorial on unjust hiring policies doesn't create the same excitement as marches and barking dogs in Birmingham, but we will continue to focus on important problems--housing, education, jobs, voting." The Afro has one of the sharpest of young black editors, Raymond Boone, 38, who has brought sophistication and verve to the Richmond edition. He feels the black press must "rededicate itself to serve as a weapon for blacks." The Afro has been there before. Its eloquent headline over a 1956 civil rights decision story: EAT ANYWHERE.

> The San Francisco Sun-Reporter (circ. 9,600) has been published for 29 years by Carl ton Goodlett, 61, a physician who won the $4,000 downpayment for the weekly in a poker game. Since then it has ranked as one black paper whose righteous anger never falters. The president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Goodlett describes himself as "an irritant. A pain. But to those who will listen, I'm a catalytic agent for change, a positive force for the reduction of political violence and economic racism in America." His position of not-so-chic radical makes it no surprise that white advertisers have not flocked to the Sun-Reporter. Until the early '70s, Goodlett subsidized his paper from the earnings of his medical practice. His view of the black press today: "It must be the matrix upon which the new image of black America is painted and formulated."

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