Magazine Sold to Publisher of Chicago Black Weekly
Savoy magazine — sold just last month to Jungle Media Group, a small New York publishing house run by three MBAs — has been sold again, to the publisher of the black-oriented Chicago weekly N’Digo, the principals confirmed today.
Jon Housman, Jungle Media CEO, told Journal-isms that about a week after his company won the bidding May 3 for Savoy in bankruptcy court in Manhattan, he received a call from N’Digo’s publisher, Hermene Hartman.
“We hit it off,” he said, “and she expressed an interest in being a partner” in Savoy.
Being a partner means working together, although, Housman said, “She owns Savoy.”
Hartman told Journal-isms that she planned to re-launch Savoy at the beginning of the year and expected to start talking with previous editors for their “advice, words of wisdom. I’d like to hear their input.”
Jungle Media had bid $375,000 plus the assumption of consumer liabilities, not to exceed $516,000, outflanking Earl G. Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. Derrick Godfrey, vice president for business ventures of Graves Ventures, later indicated that he thought that price too high, saying that “We had to make reasonable business decisions on price points.”
Housman would not disclose how much he sold the publication for, but Hartman said that Jungle Media made a profit. Housman said, “we both felt that these assets are worth a great deal, certainly more than they were auctioned for. People will look at this down the road as an incredibly valuable franchise both from a cultural and financial standpoint,” he said.
Savoy was one of three publications put on the auction block after Vanguarde Media filed for bankruptcy protection late last year.
Hartman said she was unaware that the publications were on the market — “I got to the table a little late.” When she found out that Housman’s firm had won the bidding, she called him, thinking, she said, “I got nothing to lose.”
The two companies might work together on cross-promotion, Web sites and the like. “We’re starting to do this thing all over again,” she said of Savoy.
Operations will be based in Chicago, but she said she might need to have an office in New York. Savoy’s official new owner is Jazzy Communications, an associated company of Hartman Publishing Co.
N’Digo has an audited circulation of 150,000, Hartman said.
In March, N’Digo brought on Monroe Anderson, former community affairs director at WBBM-Channel 2, as its editor.
Hartman started N’Digo in December 1989 as a free monthly after realizing there was a “gap in the media between the major media and smaller community-oriented magazines. We recognized a void in the mainstream media that overlooks and often ignores the reality of middle-class black Chicago,” she was quoted as saying.
For 18 months, it was an insert in the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Tribune became interested, reporting in 1992 that it had agreed to lend an undisclosed amount to the publication.
Jungle Media plans to continue to publish Savoy Professional, an offshoot for which the deal was closed only Wednesday, publishing two more issues this year and becoming a quarterly next year, Housman told Journal-isms.
