JUDGE ORDERS SALE OF 'DEFENDER'

By: Mark Fitzgerald Black Paper Spurred Great Migration



Ninety-five years after Robert S. Abbott created the first Chicago
Defender on the kitchen table of his boarding house, beginning the
most successful black newspaper in American history, a judge last
week ordered the family to sell the daily and its three sister weeklies
to a Chicago company.



The Defender will remain in African-American hands, but the role
Abbott's descendants in the Sengstacke family will be limited to a
single seat on its board of directors.



With her order that the family negotiate a sale to PublicMediaWorks,
Cook County (Ill.) Circuit Court Judge Bernetta Bush ended a three-year
fight for control of the paper by two Abbott grandchildren, a complicated
and contentious struggle reflected by the 14 lawyers who appeared at the
court hearing. When Abbott's nephew, Chairman and Publisher John H.
Sengstacke, died in 1997 at the age of 84, he left his 70% of Sengstacke
Enterprises stock in a trust with instructions that the company be sold.
He also left the papers facing a $3-million estate tax bill.



Abbott grandchildren Myiti and Robert Sengstacke opposed the sale. They
managed to replace the original trustee with James Lowry, who also came
to the conclusion that the papers had to be sold. A Detroit casino
operator's $12-million recapitalization plan, which was backed by Myiti
Sengstacke, collapsed last year.



Ultimately, the trustee chose a bid by PublicMediaWorks, a group of
African-American newspaper and media executives led by President Kurt
R. Cherry and backed by the minority-owned Northcoast investment firm
in Cleveland. The Chicago banking firm Duff & Phelps puts a value of
$14 million on the papers, which will be the starting point for the
eventual price.



It could take two or more months for PublicMediaWorks to determine just
what its buying. The Defender, which once had a national circulation of
230,000 and is credited with sparking the Great Migration of African
Americans from the South to the North, now sells 14,000 copies daily in
a city with a black population of 1.1 million.



Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large
for E&P.