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JULY 19, 2004
Can This Woman Save Savoy? Hermene Hartman's acquisition could put her in the top tier of black publishers In mid-May, Hermene D. Hartman glimpsed a window of opportunity. Savoy, recently billed as the hottest national magazine for black professionals in decades, had just been bought in a bankruptcy auction for $375,000. Hartman missed the auction but saw Savoy as a perfect complement to her free Chicago newspaper, N'Digo, which also targets upscale blacks. So she phoned the buyer, New York's four-year-old Jungle Media Group. Hartman figured her black publishing background was better suited to remake Savoy with the right "feel and flava." So she offered $600,000 -- from personal savings and loans -- enough to give Jungle a comfortable profit but less than the monthly was worth to her. Deal done. It will be a tough turnaround for the 56-year-old regional print queen. Hundreds of new magazines are launched every year but the majority never make it to a fifth anniversary. Re-launching an existing title is no easier. Savoy, which made its debut in 2001, proved to be a feisty upstart, boosting its ad revenue from $6 million in 2002 to $8 million in 2003 amid a tough ad market. Still, the 325,000 circulation magazine slipped into bankruptcy last fall after publisher Vanguarde Media ran short of cash. Hartman is looking beyond Savoy's recent troubles. She sees a lot of potential value in the magazine, particularly since it fits nicely within her publishing niche. After crafting a business plan, Hartman will seek $5 million to $10 million from venture capitalists this summer. That funding, she says, will help expand readership to 500,000 in three years. The idea is to be less tied, as Savoy was, to bookstore newsstands, where visibility is minimal. Hartmans wants to lure more subscribers by selling at black neighborhood venues, including churches. "We didn't have a black Vanity Fair," says Ken Smikle, president of audience researcher Target Market News Inc. "That's one thing Savoy provided." And Hartman is counting on pent-up demand from advertisers. While ad pages for all magazines slumped in 2003, says Target Market News, the top eight black publications, including Savoy, saw an 8% rise. To woo more advertising, Hartman will explore pairing Savoy with a new national quarterly published by N'Digo that will profile black luminaries. She will pay a fee to insert the mag in big-city newspapers such as The Washington Post and keep the ad revenues for herself. TOUGH TEST A "Bootstrapper," as Hartman calls herself, the flamboyant niece of the late crooner Johnny Hartman likes a challenge. In the late 1980s, she read Ebony founder John H. Johnson's book, Succeeding Against the Odds. Then a City Colleges of Chicago administrator with no publishing experience, she decided to buck the odds and launched N'Digo in 1989 with $3,000. The free tabloid has grown from a 50,000-circulation monthly to the nation's largest black weekly newspaper, with a circulation of 150,000 and $3 million in annual ad revenues. Hartman's scarce experience on the national stage will make Savoy a difficult test. But if she succeeds by giving Savoy that right feel and flava, she might just find herself in the company of the black publishing giants who inspired her.  By Roger O. Crockett in Chicago Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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