Black Money Business Jobs : EBONY & JET OUT OF BUSINESS

Kemetstry

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Johnson Publishing once chronicled black life in Ebony and Jet. It sold the magazines in 2016 and now it's going out of business.
Corilyn Shropshire and Lolly BoweanPrivacy Policy
Johnson Publishing, whose iconic Ebony and Jet magazines chronicled black life in America for decades, has filed for bankruptcy and plans a court-supervised sale of its assets.
The 77-year-old company, which sold Ebony and Jet almost three years ago, on Tuesday filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation after it was unable to restructure its operations or arrange financing or a sale.



“While the process is now in the hands of a Chapter 7 Trustee, Johnson Publishing Company is grateful for its 77 years of existence, and the unwavering loyalty, dedication and commitment of its employees, vendors and customers,” the company said in a news release. “The incredible legacy and impact of Johnson Publishing Company will always be honored and hold a proud place in the African American experience.”
The company has between $10 million and $50 million in assets as well as liabilities, according to the bankruptcy filing made in Chicago. Creditors listed in the filing include retailers Hudson-Bay and Macy’s, and former Johnson Publishing CEO Desiree Rogers.
Johnson Publishing was founded in Chicago in 1942 by John H. Johnson. In 1945, he launched Ebony, a monthly lifestyle magazine. Six years later, Jet, a digest-style publication that initially was billed as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine” began publication.


For years, the magazines captured the essence of black life in America with human interest, celebrity and lifestyle photography and stories in Ebony. News of black America dominated Jet, which first ran pictures of a battered Emmett Till in his casket, a galvanizing force for civil rights.
The company’s mission was to be the "curator of the African-American experience, past, present and future,” Johnson’s daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who succeeded her father as CEO in 2003, told the Tribune in 2014.
Christian Dior, Karl Lagerfeld and others, modeled by African-American women and men.
Columbia College in 2010. (A developer bought the building from Columbia in 2017, with plans to turn it into apartments.)
Jet became a digital-only publication in 2014. At the time, it had a circulation of more than 700,000 and was the third-largest circulation magazine for the African-American market.



To longtime architecture critic and historian Lee Bey, walking into the late modernist building that used to house Johnson Publishing’s Ebony magazine to find a funky test kitchen covered in bright colors made a statement about life for African-Americans.


“That on the outside, facing Michigan Avenue,...

In early 2015, Johnson Publishing put its entire photo archive, a collection that spanned seven decades of African-American history and included images of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Sammy Davis Jr., up for sale with the hopes of getting $40 million for it. And in June 2016, Ebony and Jet were sold to a Texas-based private equity firm for an undisclosed price.
Linda Johnson Rice declined to comment. In its news release Tuesday, the company said a “confluence of events” outside its control led to the bankruptcy filing.


Fashion Fair and the photo archive will be among the assets to be sold through the bankruptcy process.
The company and its rich history in Chicago as a publishing powerhouse was the subject of an exhibition last summer at the Stony Island Arts bank. “Ebony and Jet was ubiquity,” Theaster Gates, who curated the exhibit, told the Tribune last summer. "You know, you had TV Guide, the Tribune, the Defender and Ebony and Jet. I always thought that Ebony and Jet were done by a white company that was intentionally making a black publication. Because it was so everywhere."




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