Pressing On
New York's Black Newspapers Struggle to Matter

By Daren Briscoe

When Elinor Tatum was 13, she told her father that she thought he should run for mayor.

"He told me 'I don't need to run for mayor. I have more power where I am,'" Tatum said. Her father, Wilbert A. Tatum, was then publisher of the New York Amsterdam News. Founded in 1909, the Amsterdam News is the oldest continuously-published black newspaper in New York.

Wilbert Tatum was exaggerating, but his boast reflected awareness of what was the Amsterdam News' impressive reach and influence. Until the late 1970s, the paper's paid circulation was close to 80,000. In 1997, Tatum handed the reins to his daughter. Today, according to senior vice president Selvin Michael, paid circulation for the Amsterdam News hovers around 22,000.

At 30, Elinor Tatum may be younger than most of the things in her office on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. A stopped clock hangs high on the wall. Battered olive-green filing cabinets line one wall - a toaster-sized Rolodex squatting atop one. A sleek new laptop on the desk is one of the few signs of the modern era.

"When I took over, there was not one computer in the editorial department," she said. "Now there's one on every desk. There was no voicemail, and we've installed a whole new telephone system." Several pictures of Tatum and her father hang from the wall of her office. They show an elder Tatum - short, rotund, dark skinned and serious, with a taller and fairer Elinor, whose mother is Czech. In the pictures, Elinor is usually wearing flattering dresses and beaming. In her office, she was more serious, wearing faded blue jeans and a sweater. The corners of her brown eyes crinkled from the smoke of Marlboro cigarettes she chain-smoked. "We've brought the paper," she said, "into the 21st century."

There is little doubt that Tatum's paper is an icon. By merely surviving for nine decades, it has done what many publications cannot - endure. But the Amsterdam News has done more than merely survive; it has played a vital role in the civil-rights movement by unabashedly catering to a black audience and offering a platform for black luminaries from W.E.B DuBois to Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell.

Meanwhile, 25 blocks away on West 99th Street is the fifth-floor room where Milton Allimadi sleeps, works, and incubates his dream. Allimadi, 38, is the founder and editor in chief of The Black Star News, a paper he founded in 1996. A 1992 graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Allimadi has a purist's vision, a black newspaper driven by investigative reporting. He hopes to transform the $1 weekly paper into a daily that will compete with other black newspapers that he says "don't really cover news."

Allimadi is of average build, 6 feet or so, with brown skin, hooded eyes and an easy smile. Born in Uganda, he has the impressive vocabulary and clipped diction of someone who learned English abroad. His bedroom/office is a cluttered testament to his dedication and his lack of space; piles of books compete with stacks of back copies of Black Star News; a jumbled heap of assorted shoes lies next to a cramped computer desk. Allimadi said his paper's circulation is about 15,000, but he aspires to a 500,000-copy daily. "People want serious news," Allimadi said. "Eventually, I want to give them a well-funded, well-edited paper with a black focus. I want to balance the playing field."

Tatums' Amsterdam News and Allimadi's Black Star News represent two extremes of the black press in New York. The Amsterdam News is an institution, well established, maybe even venerable. The Black Star News, by contrast, is an upstart publication, trying to balance the goal of making a name for itself with simple survival. But both papers share a common challenge: trying to remain relevant, and profitable, in an age of declining readership and ever-increasing competition - from other print publications, black and white, and from narrowly targeted Web-publishing.

Their two papers have different strategies for meeting the challenge. Both Tatum and Allimadi said they want to improve coverage of black life and black issues. But their papers have different strategies shaped by their particular strengths, by the vision of their editors and publishers and by their access to capital. What remains to be seen is whether there is a place for the black newspaper in the 21st century marketplace.

When history's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published in New York in 1827, its founders, John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish, led the paper with an editorial that began with these words, according to "The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights," by Carl Senna:

"We wish to plead our cause. Too long have others spoken for us."

That same sentiment, said Elinor Tatum, animates the Amsterdam News today.

"If you took the New York Post and the Amsterdam News for a week, and read them both in100 years, you'd think you were in two different places," she said. "We operate in some ways as a counter to the mainstream press. They have to show what sells. We show all sides, because guess what? Our folks are not just rapists, drug dealers and murderers."

Tatum always knew she would take over for her father someday. "He didn't have to sit me down and tell me," she said. Tatum got her first published piece at 8, when her father ran an essay she wrote about how to get him to spend more time with her. Eventually she found a solution - spending time at the Amsterdam News would give her more time with her father. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York, where she was a reporter and section editor for the school paper, Tatum spent some time in Stockholm, Sweden, where she studied international relations and social welfare. When she returned to the states, she went to work for the Amsterdam News.

"I started at the bottom of the bottom," Tatum said. "Making coffee, getting lunch, making photocopies." She worked her way up to covering her own beat, the City University of New York, and then to assignment editing and layout. In 1996, Tatum decided to return to school, enrolling in New York University School of Journalism. On Dec. 5, 1997, the day she finished her coursework, Tatum went with her father to a dinner held by the New York Association of Black Journalists. Someone suggested that Elinor look at the evening's program.

"There were some words from my father about the future of the paper," she said. "It was signed, 'William A. Tatum, publisher emeritus and chairman of the board; Elinor Tatum, publisher and editor-in-chief.'"

Elinor Tatum said that the major changes at the paper since she took over have been technological, buying computers, installing the new telephone system and preparing to take the Amsterdam News online. She said the Amsterdam News is involved in a program with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade association of African-American-owned papers, to get the majority of black newspapers online by the end of 2001. "That's another project," she said. "It's going to be a matter of when I have time to do it. The web is too fickle an outlet to not do it right."

In the meantime, Elinor Tatum's Amsterdam News is much like Bill Tatum's Amsterdam News. The latest issue features front-page articles on Al Sharpton's recent visit to the Sudan, racially charged riots in Cincinnati, and an editorial written by Bill Tatum - the 109th in an ongoing series - calling for the removal of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Other articles focus on Navy bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, opposition to the possible hiring of an officer connected to the Amadou Diallo case by the New York Fire Department, and Mississippi's vote to retain a state flag that prominently displays the flag of the Confederacy.

The paper has full-page ads from Con Edison, Verizon, and General Motors. A handful of reporters (the Amsterdam News employs four full-time) seem to write most of the paper's articles, but the 56-page issue covers a wide range of issues and topics. There are sections on international news, health care, sports, trends and business, as well as a four-page classified advertising section.

Throughout the 1970s, according to Michael, the Amsterdam News' senior vice president and chief financial officer, the paper had a weekly distribution of 90,000-100,000, with a paid circulation of 80,000-85,000. Today's distribution, 30,000-35,000, with paid circulation of around 22,000, is a shadow of that.

"What happened?" Michael asked rhetorically, "There was an out-migration of the black middle class to the suburbs. There's been a vast expansion of radio, TV, and Internet that have changed people's habits of getting information. Also, other publications are writing more about black life than they were formerly, so people are getting information not just from black papers, but from many sources." Michael's observations are borne out by the prevalence of black-themed web sites like NetNoir, The Black World Today and Afro-Americ@. Mainstream publications are also paying more attention to "black" issues: wide coverage of racial profiling and the debate over reparations for slavery being two recent examples.

"One of the strongest elements of our paper is the classified ad section," said Michael, who also said that 75 percent of the paper's revenue (which he declined to disclose) comes from advertising. "Black publications don't usually have strong classified advertising," Michael said, noting that six full-time employees work on classified advertising. Still, Michael said that the Amsterdam News' approach to the future is nearly the same as its approach in the past: hold onto its existing readership. "We've got to continue to appeal to that same middle class market," he said. "But it's just a smaller core."

Milton Allimadi's challenge is not to maintain a core of customers, but to build one. The Black Star News is his dream, realized, what he calls a "serious black-owned" paper. The paper, which is also published on the web (www.blackstarnews.com) has the look and feel of an upstart publication. The April 19-25 issue is a hodgepodge of articles, editorials, interviews and essays. A front-page article examines Sudanese slavery, a page 2 editorial comes to the defense of comptroller Carl H. McCall's family, and page 3 explores the legacy of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. Some of the articles appear without bylines, and Allimadi says that some of the ads in the paper are clipped and copied from other papers. The tactic of giving advertisers free space is an inexpensive way of building good will and encouraging paid ads in the future, Allimadi explained

Allimadi decided to start his own paper when the black-owned paper he was working for, the now-defunct City Sun, went bankrupt in 1996. "When I started at the City Sun," Allimadi said, "they were already operating under a heavy debt load. I went to work one day and there was a marshal there. He gave us 15 minutes to get our things." Soon after, Allimadi was working on a business plan for the Black Star News, which he sent to as many as 50 people, among them entertainer Bill Cosby, who Allimadi had met while jogging nine years earlier. Not long after, Allimadi received a $10,000 check in the mail from Cosby. "I thought it was a bill," he said.

With Cosby's seed money, Allimadi began publishing the Black Star News as a monthly paper. He labored in near-poverty and relative obscurity until 1998, when the Black Star News obtained documentation that global financial services firm Morgan Stanley Dean Witter had paid an informant for information about Christian Curry, a former junior analyst who was threatening to sue the company for discrimination. Two years later, Morgan Stanley and Curry reached a settlement. The firm denied paying Curry any money, but the Black Star News reported a settlement figure of $29.7 million. Last October, Curry bought a majority interest in the Black Star News, for a reported $2 million.

Curry, who has been portrayed as an irresponsible and free-spending playboy in articles in Brill's Content and New York magazine, is now listed as chairman and publisher of the Black Star News. Allimadi is quiet about the arrangement, saying only that, "I have editorial control." He is still pursuing a three-stage business plan. The Black Star News is in the first phase of that 15-page plan, which promises that the paper will compete with the Amsterdam News through better reporting and editing, better technology, and a refusal to "coddle African-American politicians and officials who fail to deliver services to the community."

These days, Allimadi's criticisms of the Amsterdam News tend to be more indirect. In a February article in Brill's Content magazine about The Black Star News, he was quoted as saying that the Amsterdam News "does a lot of fluffy stuff and press releases and photos of people smiling." Allimadi said that after the article ran, he began getting calls from friends at the Amsterdam News who wanted to know why he was disparaging the paper.

"So now I don't talk about them," Allimadi says. Nor has he retracted any of the statements he made. But Allimadi isn't the Amsterdam News' only critic. E.R. Shipp, a journalism professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and frequent critic of the paper, echoed some of Allimadi's complaints.

"They don't go after any local politicians," she said. "There's not a whole lot of news in the paper, but there are a lot of pictures of celebrities and puff pieces." Shipp said that in response to what they see as inadequate and overly negative coverage by mainstream outlets, black papers have historically walked a fine line between journalism and community-boosting. But despite the paper's shortcomings, Shipp said, many people may continue to support a paper like the Amsterdam News. "I think some people of my generation continue to buy the Amsterdam News out of a sense of loyalty." That loyalty, Shipp suggested, may have more to do with the paper being black-owned than with the quality of its journalism.

Elinor Tatum said she doesn't see Allimadi's paper as a threat to the Amsterdam News. "I think there's room enough for everybody in New York," she said. In fact, Tatum said she would like to see The Black Star News succeed. "Every time a black newspaper goes under, a little part of the industry dies," she said.

While the Amsterdam News seems to be in a good position to survive, if not thrive, in the 21st century media world, The Black Star News is still trying to find the formula for the elusive goal of longevity and profitability. Allimadi's five-year business plan calls for moving in stages to bi-weekly publication, followed by daily editions. While Curry's investment gives the paper a much-needed financial, the brash new millionaire has also indicated that he would like more celebrity coverage and entertainment news in the Black Star.

For Allimadi, his goal remains unchanged: to produce a respectable, black-owned investigative paper. "It's very rare," he said, "to find people that have a vision that's as strictly journalistic as mine." Yet as the two papers continue their struggle for black readers, the path to his goal often seems clouded with uncertainty.