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Defender Prepares Its New
Offense
Who's the new editor of the Defender? I asked Tom Picou. "I am," he said. "President, chairman, CEO, and I'm the editor. At least for the first year. To be sure I get things on track." Last May the future of the Chicago Defender, five years after the death of the owner, John Sengstacke, finally looked settled. If all went well, Picou, Sengstacke's nephew by marriage, would take over Sengstacke Enterprises in July. Didn't happen. All trustees, descendants, beneficiaries, judges, lawyers, accountants, and tax collectors who had their teeth in the Defender could not be so quickly subdued. Not until this week, close to six years after his uncle died, could Picou walk into the Defender building on South Michigan as the boss. "I'm not going to change the paper for three or four weeks," he told me, but then he means to turn it upside down. Is the Defender now the place for a sharp young reporter to submit an application? "Not at this point. Not yet. Certainly it will be after the first 12 months. We have a lot of things we have to make up [first]. You don't eliminate your deterioration overnight." Picou said he had in mind the years the Defender has spent staggering along in trusteeship since Sengstacke's death in 1997, but the Defender's been failing for decades. In the glory years Pullman porters took it south with them, and its message of opportunity helped inspire a vast migration. But circulation dwindled from 250,000 to 20,000, and for that handful reading it fell somewhere between a habit and a chore. Picou guesses the average Defender reader is over 55 years old. "We're going to specifically target a segment of the market," he said. "We're going to attract a much younger readership." He didn't tell me exactly how he would do this, but he said, "We're going to put into place a number of outreach programs to involve the community." Running those programs will be the new publisher's job. He's David Milliner, a marketing executive who was once a Defender copyboy and later John Sengstacke's assistant. The new chief financial officer is Kurt Cherry, an investment banker. In an earlier chapter of the Defender interregnum, Cherry was the one trying to buy the paper, and Milliner was going to become his publisher. But Cherry's financing collapsed, and in 2001 Picou stepped up with his own bid and invited both men to throw in with him. Picou, who went to work for the Defender as a teenager, rose from baseball writer to editor to president of Sengstacke Enterprises before leaving the company in 1984 because he couldn't put up with the boss. "You couldn't win if John Sengstacke said, `I've made up my mind,'" Picou once told me. Picou moved to Florida, where he ran a couple of papers, but in 1996 Sengstacke brought him back as a consultant to the company's three weeklies: Detroit's Chronicle, Pittsburgh's Courier, and Memphis's Tri-State Defender. Today the president of Sengstacke Enterprises is John Sengstacke's son Robert, who grew up with Picou and considers him a brother. Robert, a professional photographer, had his own rocky relationship with John, longing for greater responsibilities than his father would ever give him. "My father did not see anyone capable of operating the Defender but himself," Robert Sengstacke once told me. "If I have any regrets, it's not so much not running the Defender but not recognizing the kind of man dad was and taking off sooner." Robert Sengstacke's daughter Myiti idolized her grandfather. It was Myiti, then 25, who promised him on his deathbed to keep the Defender in the family, then somehow prevented the trustees he'd left his newspapers with from selling them to settle his estate. Early on she found a buyer of her own, a Detroit businessman who wanted the Chronicle and said she could run the Defender and her father and Picou the other two papers. That was another deal that fell through, and when it did she blamed her father for not supporting it. They made a peace, and today Myiti Sengstacke can say she kept her promise. When Picou finally decided to go after the Defender, I asked why he hadn't acted earlier, he being the only member of the family with the expertise to take over. One big reason, he said, was the family squabbling. "The concentration should have been on securing the company. You can always dicker over control later." Myiti Sengstacke will be Picou's "administrative assistant." To be groomed for bigger things? "Yes," he said. Though the four papers nominally belong to Sengstacke Enterprises, the company that now controls them is Picou's Real Times Inc. Outside of Sengstacke Enterprises is a fifth Real Times paper, the Front Page in Detroit. This weekly was started in 2000 by Picou's pal Sam Logan Jr., who'd been publisher of the Chronicle and had turned it into the company's cash cow, but quit after failing to be named president of Sengstacke Enterprises. "Sam Logan has come back to the Chronicle," said Picou. "We have two papers in Detroit now, each paper publishing once a week." Down the road, he says, the Chronicle and Front Page will merge. I asked him who he was assigning to write the big story in Wednesday's Defender announcing the new management. He didn't want to say, but allowed that it wouldn't be anyone on staff. Laughing in the Face of Diversity If the Civil War were being fought now, the south would argue that a tyrannical central authority was trying to impose a single rigid vision of race relations on 11 locally based and admirably diverse experiments in paternalism. Whatever anyone is up to these days, only a fool denies that diversity is the watchword. The president yields to no one in his passion for diversity in education as he tries to dismantle a University of Michigan admissions plan that produces it. And media conglomerates gulp down independent properties while swearing that the marketplace of opinion will flourish as a result. "Thus," spake Tribune Company, "allowing newspapers to speak in a broadcast environment does not limit the number of voices but adds to it. It permits a new voice to use the broadcast media -- a voice to which many television viewers and radio listeners do not have access today." I'm quoting from the 32-page statement filed by the Tribune Company with the Federal Communications Commission on January 2 arguing for abolition of the federal "Newspaper Rule." That's the rule prohibiting one company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same market. "The very reason for the Newspaper Rule is to protect against the same viewpoint, the same message, the same content, being expressed in two local media," the Tribune Company accurately acknowledged, then turned this logic on its head. "The Newspaper Rule perversely seeks to promote diversity by censoring it -- by stopping a newspaper from speaking on commonly owned radio or television stations in local markets." Thanks to grandfathering, the Tribune Company owns the WGN radio and TV stations as well as Chicago's largest newspaper. Thanks to recent acquisitions, this expansionist company also owns TV stations and newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, and Hartford. If the Newspaper Rule isn't nullified, it will have to kiss off some of these assets. Instead it wants to buy more, especially a second TV station in Chicago. In its editorials the Tribune has lined up squarely behind its corporate parent's business interests -- this over an issue vastly more significant and more obscure than that outfield screen at Wrigley Field. On July 31, 2001, a Tribune editorial praised the new FCC chairman, Michael Powell, for challenging the rules against media cross-ownership. "The regulations are outmoded," the Tribune declared. "Powell believes the market and the spirit of innovation will achieve that diversity of views [supposedly protected by the old rules]. He's absolutely right. |
