Content area
Full Text
Don Anderson remains steadfast, but he knows what he's up against.
The distinguished executive, credited with helping to launch The Comedy Channel and Black Entertainment TV, barely flinches at the prospect of getting a black magazine off the ground during a time when advertising is flat.
"Forty years ago there weren't enough willing sponsors to keep Nat King Cole on television," says Mr. Anderson, recently named publisher of Emerge magazine. "Since then we've seen Bo Derek cornrow her hair; blue-eyed blonds wearing dreadlocks; and white women in Hollywood thickening their lips with implant surgery."
To Mr. Anderson all this proves that African-American culture is crossing 110th Street and moving into mainstream society. But whether advertisers will follow with enough money to support new publications is an issue that Mr. Anderson and others in his position will have to grapple with.
For, as the market for black magazines grows, it is becoming more competitive and more segmented. In the New York area alone, there are now more than a dozen magazines aimed at a black readership, from Class, which is geared toward Caribbean blacks, to Black Health, distributed in the waiting rooms of African-American doctors.
Some of these publications, with their timely insight and fresh layout and design, are challenging their more traditional counterparts -- magazines such as Black Enterprise, Essence and...