Soon at 'Chicago Defender': New Look and 'Unapologetically Black'

By: Mark Fitzgerald Next Monday, the 100-year-old Chicago Defender hits the street with the most radical makeover in its history, and an audacious new slogan: "Honest. Balanced. Truthful. Unapologetically Black."

Since Executive Editor Roland S. Martin hit town in the summer of 2004, he has labored to inject some excitement into what had become a smudgy, somnolent mess, a black-oriented daily in a city of 1.1 million African Americans that couldn't manage to sell 15,000 copies on an average day.

Until now, though, he focused the paper's meager resources on producing eye-catching front-pages -- followed by inside pages laid out in a 1950s-era style.

Monday, readers will see a top-to-bottom rehab.

Starting with the banner: The name "Defender" dominates a third of the page, with "Chicago" squeezed into a side rail.

"That's what people call it, 'The Defender,' everybody knows it's from Chicago," Martin said in an interview the other day in his office overlooking Lake Michigan in the paper's new digs, 17 floors up in a downtown high-rise. "Chicago was taking up half of the top of the paper. I wanted 'Defender' to be much more prominent."

To splash that new Defender banner across the paper, Martin and Kenon White, the recent graduate who created the redesign, jettisoned the red Sphinx logo that was introduced decades ago under the old Sengstacke family ownership.

Any regrets about dropping this long-time symbol in the paper's centennial year, they were asked. White just laughed. He'd wanted to get rid of it from the very beginning.

No regrets, Martin added: "Bottom-line? It has to be contemporary, nothing else is acceptable." And from a design standpoint, he added, the Sphinx just kind of sat there, gumming up some layout possibilities.

But then, the logo is just one of many traditional elements that are being thrown overboard.

For years, the Defender has had the weakest comics page in Chicagoland, with just seven strips, including such moldy-oldies as "Henry," "Mandrake The Magician," "Hazel" and "Donald Duck."

"We're replacing that with all-black comics," Martin said. Among the additions, a mix of offerings from traditional syndicates and freelancers, are "Herb and Jamaal," "Wee Pals," and Keith Knight's "Think..." and the "Our Roots" panels.

Ken Parish Perkins will write a regular national television column, Martin said. Perkins, who resigned from the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram last November amid plagiarism charges, has been writing occasionally for the Defender since the beginning of the year.

A rotating corps of advice columnists -- each with a different specialty in advice for single, women and married couples -- will soon be introduced, along with a feature that harkens back to the very roots of the newspaper Robert Sengstacke Abbott created on his kitchen table back in 1906. Abbott's relentless campaign urging blacks to abandon the South of Jim Crow laws and settle in the industrial North is credited with touching off what became known as the Great Migration.

"Robert Abbott used to write a column telling folks coming from the South how to act in the city," Martin said. When a column Martin himself wrote about family discipline got a big reaction, he hit on the idea of a kind of black Miss Manners feature: "Miss ActRight."

She'll join entertainment and gossip writer Art Simms whose "Chat Daddy" advice column was added earlier this month.

The sports section has been redesigned for action, graphics artist White said. Like the rest of the paper, the look will be more magazine-style, but with many design elements. "It'll be bouncy, like a run-and-shoot offense, images broken out at different places, and with a lot of photo cut lines," White said.

In another big change, the sports page is moving off the back cover of the tabloid.

"That really is a wasted ad position," Martin said. Indeed, in recent weeks, half of the back page has been taken up by a house ad for subscriptions.

If there was a newspaper inspiration for the redesign, Martin said, it was probably The Dallas Morning News' youth-oriented free tab Quick. "They make excellent use of white space," he said.

The new Defender, Martin said, will be at least 28 pages every day, and 32 on some, another big change for a paper that sometimes published issues barely thicker than the Best Buy insert inside.