Is Ebony Magazine For Sale?

It's been a year of excruciating decisions for publishing companies—layoffs, pullbacks, reduction in advertising dollars, closures. Now it appears Johnson Publishing’s chairman and CEO, Linda Johnson Rice, has reached what must have been an agonizing decision: Johnson Publishing is seeking a buyer or investor for its flagship publication, Ebony, in an effort aimed at securing the survival of the nation's oldest magazine devoted to African-American life. It's unclear whether the company's other properties, including Jet, would be part of a possible sale-perhaps to Time Warner. You can read the rest of the Newsweek article here.

In 1942, with a $500 loan collateralized with his mother's furniture, John Johnson launched what would become the world's largest African-American-owned publishing company. Three years later he began publishing Ebony, which changed the face of publishing and media merely by its existence and mission. Johnson, who died in 2005, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.