The New York Times, known in the business as “The Grey Lady,” is now dabbling in black. This week the Gainesville Sun, a subsidiary of the newspaper of record itself, launched the Gainesville Guardian, the Times’ first foray into the Black Press. Not surprisingly, local owners of African-American periodicals in and around that Florida city (population 95,477 in the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau report) raised alarms.
“We are competing for the same dollars they will go after,” Candace Lewis-Khufia, owner of Mahogany Revue, a bi-weekly magazine that serves the Gainesville and Ocala areas, objected to Starla Vaughns Cherin of the NNPA.
Clara McLaughlin Criswell is publisher and editor-in-chief of the Florida Star, a Jacksonville-based paper that also serves the Gainesville market and one of more than 20 black newspapers in Florida belonging to the NNPA, of which the American is a member. “Why couldn’t they come to me?” Criswell wondered.
What was stopping the Times from partnering with and bolstering the position of a black publisher already versed in the market? To have done so would have been noble in ethics but of dubious value as a business decision. The Times, of course, is in business to make a profit for itself and not the Black Press.
And if the Times had partnered with an existing black-owned publication, that likely would have raised a different cry – namely, that yet another African-American media outlet had been co-opted by a white corporate giant, along the lines of Black Entertainment Television, Essence magazine and just about everybody else. (Message to conspiracy theorists, by the way: the American is not owned by the Post-Dispatch or any entity larger or whiter than Donald M. Suggs.)
Gainesville Sun Executive Editor Jim Osteen has said that focus groups informed him that there was no newspaper serving East Gainesville, where the city’s black population (22,181 residents, or more than 23 percent, at the 2000 Census) is largely based. They were either mistaken or extremely dismissive of the competition.
The Grey Lady’s new black weekly, with a projected circulation of about 10,000, could start printing as early as next week.
“We are still trying to look at models of good weekly newspapers,” Osteen told a reporter from the Florida Alligator. The EYE has a hunch that one of the papers the Times’ men in Florida are looking at must be NNPA’s best newspaper from 2005 – and that’s the very newspaper you are holding in your hands.