Amid A Crisis, Ebony, Jet Look To Web For Help

Eric Easter may have one of the most challenging jobs in interactive media. As Vice President, Digital & Entertainment for Johnson Publishing Co., he must grow a website that supports two of Black America’s most famous magazines – Ebony and Jet – whose combined circulation is more than two million. At the same time, Easter feels he should use the Internet to reach a new, younger audience that does not read the magazines.

The question is whether he can accomplish both missions, and the stakes could not be higher. By some accounts, Johnson Publishing is in crisis mode, with its print advertising revenue down three consecutive years and getting worse because of the recession and the wholesale shifting of advertising dollars to the Internet. This year alone, Ebony’s advertising revenue has dropped 31.8 percent, according to the Publishers Reference Bureau. And the worst may not be over, as many marketers continue shifting dollars away from black media and focusing on the faster growing Hispanic audience. The situation is so serious that Johnson Publishing has been forced to make a series of staff layoffs totaling some 150 people, according to published reports.

It all adds to the pressure on Easter to grow a digital business that can help offset the loss of millions of dollars of print advertising revenue. Even Easter doesn’t know if that is possible, at least over the short term.

“The reality of the challenge is that the revenue numbers on the print side are so drastically different than what we see in digital,” he told BlackWeb 2.0. “You just have to gauge where you have been and where you can be.”

For EbonyJet.com that means growing a cleaner, more sophisticated site than it has offered in the past. The site is heavily populated with intellectually driven content that often differs from the magazines in both style and approach. While sites like BlackPlanet.com are driven by social networking, EbonyJet.com intentionally stays away from dating and personal profiles. Instead, it is more similar to content sites such as theRoot.com. It’s a work in progress. Unique visits to EbonyJet.com reached a 2009 high of 110,000 in July according to Compete.com, far behind Black Planet’s 1.5 million and theRoot’s 500,000.

But Easter is determined to stay the course. He came to Johnson Publishing from The Washington Post Co., where he saw the success of content-driven Slate.com. He admits that he uses Slate as a blueprint for success. “We want to extend the brand,” he says of EbonyJet.com. “We want to set the foundation and become the authority in certain categories – lots on travel, cooking, music, politics. Over time that establishes a foundation and if we move into other [related] businesses across other platforms we will have already set ourselves as an authority in those categories. It’s about a proof of concept, really. Can we take this brand and do new stuff and be accepted? We are still proving the point.”