'Wave' Newspapers CEO: Papers Making Money Despite Bankruptcy Filing

By: Mark Fitzgerald Wave Community Newspapers CEO Pluria Marshall Jr. said Wednesday that the big chain of papers targeting African Americans in Los Angeles is making money, though its parent company filed last week for Bankruptcy Court protection.

"From a profit-and-loss standpoint, we are profitable, we are in the black," Marshall said in a telephone interview. "When we took over this operation in 2000, it was bleeding, and now we are making money."

Wave Community Newspapers is one of the nation's biggest chains of black-interest papers, publishing six free weeklies and a Spanish-language paper with a combined distribution of 150,000 in the Los Angeles market. The Wave group has been regarded in recent years as a good example of the reviving black press.

The papers will continue to publish during bankruptcy protection, Marshall said. "Nothing changes, absolutely 100% nothing changes," he said. "No circulation is going to be cut, no employees are going to be cut, nothing. This is strictly a balance-sheet affair."

Marshall portrayed the filing of Chapter 11 relief as a "proactive approach" to protect the company's assets while it negotiates with the trustee of a bankrupt bank that is calling in $4 million in loans. "We have one secured creditor, the Los Angeles Community Development Bank that went in to bankruptcy [and] went from an entity that we worked with, to one that was very difficult to work with," Marshall said.

Wave wants to sell "certain assets," Marshall explained, and settle the debt with the proceeds, while the bank trustee has demanded the assets as satisfaction for the loan. The loan was taken out in 1999 by the previous ownership, he added.

"If we had no cash and no assets, we'd be having a different conversation, but we have both," he said.

Wave's black-interest papers face stiff competition from the weekly Los Angeles Sentinel, and a new paper that will be distributed door-to-door in affluent African American L.A. neighborhoods is scheduled to be launched Jan. 13. The paper, Our Weekly, will have an initial free distribution of 50,000 copies, said Natalie Cole, the former Los Angeles Times advertising executive who is heading the venture.