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Here’s what seems to have happened recently at the Chicago Defender: Roland Martin, the outsize personality who as executive editor brought the Defender back from the ranks of the living dead, told Editor & Publisher that he didn’t intend to stay on after his contract expired in March. E&P’s Mark Fitzgerald published the story online January 18 and made his own feelings clear: “Martin’s self-promotion . . .” he wrote, “bolstered the Defender’s image dramatically.” Martin “single-handedly pulled the paper into the 21st century.” Martin’s bosses at Real Times Media “never seemed to know what they had in Martin.” Fitzgerald’s take on the Defender—which coincides with my own—didn’t sit well with those bosses, and Martin was promptly “reassigned.” About a week later Hiram Jackson, the Detroit-based CEO of Real Times Media, replaced Martin with “interim” editor Glenn Reedus.
There’s only one reporter on the news staff because the second reporter, Mema Ayi, quit on February 1. A day earlier, a staff meeting that Reedus called and Jackson attended failed to assure her that the paper was in good hands and its future was something she wanted to be part of. “They want more copy–local, local, local,” she says, but with such a tiny staff, “I haven’t been able to get a sense of what that means.” She intended to leave anyway on March 31, Martin’s last day, and when he called and told her he’d been booted out of the editor’s chair, “I knew I might have to leave sooner rather than later.” Even though Jackson claims to have an open mind on the subject, she expects him to reduce the Defender to twice-a-week publication–she says he’s made it clear he thinks the paper would make greater profits on that schedule.
