The company was founded in January 2003 by a consortium of Chicago and Detroit business leaders to take over the assets of Sengstacke Enterprises Inc., the longtime owner of five of the papers.

Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905, billing it the "World's Greatest Weekly".

Sengstacke also used the Defender as a means to grow the community, writing stories about Northern city life that enticed African-American residents of the Southern United States to move to Chicago, a phenomenon that came to be known as the Great Migration.

He had previously established the Michigan Chronicle in Detroit in 1936,[2] and turned the Chicago paper's Memphis bureau into the Tri-State Defender weekly newspaper in 1951.

[5] Logan was one of the investors in Real Times, and the company continued to publish FrontPage alongside the four Sengstacke titles.