The Chicago Defender, the storied African American newspaper, will cease print operations after a final edition set to be released Wednesday.
After that, the 114-year-old publication will switch to a digital-only platform starting July 11, Defender CEO Hiram E. Jackson and Vice President Dyanna Lewis said in a letter sent to advertisers Friday.
“It is no secret that the media and publishing landscape has shifted drastically,” they wrote. “The pace of change continues at dizzying speeds. That is why, over the past few years, we’ve made significant investments in digital media. Having experienced initially promising returns, we have concluded that we need to do more to continue to be bold in building a business model for the future.
”It is simply time for the Chicago Defender to break away from the printed page and put more focus on bringing our readers daily content from the African American perspective and increasing the impact of our community voice,” they wrote, calling the full digital switch a “win-win” for readers, advertisers and employees.
“There is so much opportunity for the Chicago Defender to be bold nationally and become a premier player in the African American media space,” Jackson and Lewis wrote. “We have to continually evolve our focus to reflect the habits of our readers and our audience. We remain focused on those vehicles that genuinely serve our client base.”
Robert S. Abbott published the first Chicago Defender from his landlady’s dining room table in May 1905, according to the 1998 documentary “The Black Press — Soldiers Without Swords.”
On the paper’s 70th anniversary, the late Chicago Sun-Times journalist Vernon Jarrett wrote that Abbott and the Defender’s impact couldn’t be measured. The paper’s bold headlines of the early 1900s through the civil rights movement called for an end to Jim Crow laws that kept the first generations of freed slaves from voting, housing and education.
In its heyday during the late 1920s, the Defender presided as the leading national voice for the African American community, with more than half of its weekly 250,000 circulation outside the Chicago area. In the following years, a young Eugene Pincham would deliver the paper in his Alabama hometown, where he “made nickels” long before arriving in Chicago for law school and, later, a distinguished judicial career.
It was in 1929 that the paper created one of its lasting legacies: The Bud Billiken Day Parade. Abbott, the paper’s founder, and his managing editor, already had a “youth page,” and decided to create a club named for the mythical “Bud Billiken” — associated with an ancient Chinese character believed to be the guardian angel of all children, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. It became so popular that Abbott decided a parade was in order.
