By Carrie Seidman Columnist
It is no secret that community newspapers, hard hit by the transition from print to digital, have been further crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, as businesses dealing with their own financial viability have withdrawn advertising in droves. That is resulted in many publications implementing layoffs, furloughs, and cost-cutting measures to stay afloat until the economy — and hopefully the advertising dollar with it — rebounds.
But at the weekly Tempo News, which under one name or another has served as the news source for the African American community in Sarasota and Manatee counties since 1959, there is nothing to trim. Other than a handful of mostly unpaid contributors, the “staff” consists of only Johnny Hunter Sr. — who acquired the publication in 1990 after serving as its sales manager for three years —and his son, Johnny Hunter Jr., who joined the business in 1994.
Just after the first of the year, a major advertiser pulled its weekly sponsorship from the paper, as well as from seven other publications that represent virtually all the remaining Black-owned publications in Florida. Then, as the virus shut down the economy, nearly all Tempo’s remaining advertisers did the same. (Sarasota Ford, one of its longest-standing accounts, has continued to buy the back page of each edition.)
“It’s always a struggle with a minority business,” says Hunter Jr., who handles production for the tabloid, which operates out of his father’s 1,200-square-foot Newtown home. “Then COVID-19 hit and, boy, it was a pounding.”
Since January, the paper has lost 85 percent of its revenue, most of which came from advertisers outside the Black community. Multiple applications filed for emergency pandemic relief, from local, state, and federal sources, were denied, either because the funding source was immediately depleted or because Tempo was deemed ineligible as a “home-based business.”
Hunter Sr. was chagrined that no targeted notification nor preference was given for this funding to minority- or veteran-owned businesses like his. A public record request he filed revealed the Board of County Commissioners set its own evaluation criteria for local grants, which did not include ethnicity or race. (No data is available on the number of minority-owned businesses that benefited from funding.)
Out of options, the Hunters launched a Go Fund Me campaign in mid-May, asking for community support and saying revenues had fallen “to a critically low level and are threatening the very existence of the newspaper.”
But the campaign has drawn minimal response, collecting (as of last week) less than $600 of its $25,000 goal — and nearly half of that from a single donor. The first contribution of $25 came from none other than Johnny Hunter Sr. himself.
The publisher found his calling in the news business belatedly, after serving 8½ years in prison, where he committed his life to God and trained as a law clerk. Not long after returning to Newtown, where he was born and raised, he began working for Fred William “Flick” Jackson, who initially created Tempo Magazine in 1987 as a monthly insert in the longstanding Weekly Bulletin.AdChoices
His son joined the business after his own military service, and the two gradually turned it from a monthly, to a bi-weekly, to a weekly, eventually forcing the Bulletin’s closure. Their mission has remained, as Jackson’s was, to document life in the local Black community in a positive way that white newspapers did not or would not.
“We’ve always prided ourselves in being a paper with great human interest that doesn’t do anything negative,” Hunter Jr. says. “You’ll never see who went to jail in our paper. But you will see awards, features, social events and everything that people need to know about their community.”
The free paper, which is distributed to churches, barber shops and convenience stores throughout the two counties, claims a circulation of 40,000, but Hunter Sr. says actual readership is higher, as every edition is shared and circulated by its mostly 55-and-older readership. You can still walk into many a home in Newtown and find the current Tempo on a side table and a framed yellowed Weekly Bulletin clipping, marking some family accomplishment, hanging on the wall.
Which is precisely why the Hunters, who have acceded to the digital age with a website, are still determined to save the hard copy with the red, white and blue banner, which is printed at Suncoast Press in Venice. For Hunter Sr., a man of devout faith, there is no question of quit.
“We are committed to keeping it going,” he said. “God gave me this paper; he knows my mission. He said He’d supply all I need, and I believe it.”
And though none of Hunter Jr.’s eight children seem interested in taking over the family business, he hopes one of his 21 grandchildren still might. Because this is no longer a question of livelihood, he says, but of legacy.
“The reason I came initially was to help my Dad,” he says. “But after over 20 years of doing this, it’s much greater than me. By all means, we are going to keep it going somehow. We don’t have a choice. Tempo is an institution. There is a legacy to protect. If it goes, there might never again be another Black paper here.”
