The Reporter’s Future
She wasn’t that much browner: “I won’t repeat some of the jokes and comments people make around me because they assume I won’t be offended,” she says. But she felt apart. “Like any black person would tell you, that is a key part of their identity–this is obviously a key part of my identity. More than getting the message that I’m inferior or stupid or violent–some of the messages that dark-skinned people get–is this sense that I’m different, this feeling that I’m an outsider, that I’m in a special category.
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In their statement 29 years ago introducing the Reporter, McDermott and Calhoun asserted that “the special problem of the 70’s is racial inequality, the deep disparities in the condition and quality of life which separate the races and which are the legacy of generations of injustice.”
The Community Renewal Society founded the Reporter after concluding that the nation’s racial problems would have to be solved locally and could not be solved without analysis and hard data. The dispassionate, meticulous reporting of the Reporter altered the tone of racial debate in Chicago. But today it isn’t obvious that the Reporter still matters as much, and Tate must argue that it does. “We’re not in the middle of civil rights,” she says. “Harold Washington isn’t running for mayor. In some ways it’s more important to have the Reporter because racism is more institutionalized and less overt. It’s much easier to sweep under the rug, but there are still glaring disparities based on race. There are lots of subtleties around race that don’t get fully explored in the mainstream media.”
The Reporter has always given away more copies than it sells, distributing them to policy makers, politicians, and journalists. But now it’s actively looking for ways to raise both its low profile and its revenues. A recent grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation pays for a new marketing director. Another grant, from the MacArthur Foundation, will allow the Reporter to hire consultants who’ll study circulation. “We need to come out with a business plan,” says Tate. “We’ve never really surveyed our readers to see who reads us, and if the people who get us free would pay for us.”
Could the Reporter turn into a middle-class bitch sheet?
Washington is friends with Myiti Sengstacke, who’s been struggling to keep the Defender in the family ever since her grandfather, John Sengstacke, died in 1997 after running the paper for 57 years. The last time I looked, John Sengstacke’s nephew Tom Picou, an experienced newspaper executive, was bidding $10 million to take over Sengstacke Enterprises. But Washington doesn’t think it’ll happen. “My impression is that if he had the wherewithal he’d have bought it already. There are plenty of black people in this town and this country with the money to turn that paper around, but they don’t seem interested. I know that everybody I talk to over at the Defender would love to see some deep-pockets backer come in so they can kick ass.”
