Black Orange Owners Not Yet Willing to Call It Quits : Publishing: But magazine that serves African American community is likely to fold if they can’t find investors at session Saturday.

After struggling for more than three years to publish the money-losing Black Orange, the county’s only magazine geared toward African Americans, owners Randall and Joyce Jordan are tired and broke. But not out.

Not yet.

As a last-ditch effort to draw financial support for the publication, the Jordans are holding an “information sharing session” Saturday with subscribers, advertisers and anyone interested in the status of the Black Orange, which hasn’t published an issue since July.

If the couple finds no interested investors or buyers by year’s end, they will print as their swan song one last issue in February to recognize Black History Month.

After that, Orange County’s first and only magazine for the African American community would longer exist.

“We’ve determined that we cannot continue the Black Orange by ourselves,” said Randall Jordan. “For [the magazine] to continue, we’re going to need some type of participation, some type of investment from an outside entity.”

James Tippins, president of the NAACP Orange County chapter, said he will attend the meeting and is concerned that the African American community may lose its “only local vessel of communications.”

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Since launching the magazine in their garage-turned-printing room in Mission Viejo in February 1992, the Jordans, who are in their mid-40s, have depleted their savings for a venture that lost money almost from the start.

But believing in their product and the services it provides for Orange County’s relatively small African American community--42,000, according to the 1990 census--the couple pressed on.

They borrowed against their home. They charged their credit cards to the limit to raise the $3,500 per month needed to publish the magazine. More painfully, they liquidated their 14-year-old son’s college funds.

“Joyce and I could make it day to day, [by] selling our car or moving into an apartment,” Jordan said. “But what’s heartbreaking to me is that we have almost completely jeopardized our son’s education.”

“Our struggle is to stay within this area for his benefit,” Joyce Jordan added. “He enjoys his high school years. Why take him out of this environment because of our decisions?”

Last March, in an attempt to upgrade the magazine to draw new subscribers to the scant 500 that they had, the Jordans redesigned the Black Orange, replacing the orange construction paper covers with a more costly glossy, photo-imprinted front. It was an expensive decision, one that just about wiped them out financially.

“We tried to hold on as long as we could, but that last grasp was what did it,” Randall Jordan said. “We saw all the danger signs, but we wouldn’t let go. We just had to try one more time.”

The Jordans don’t want to dwell too much on what led to the magazine’s financial failure. It is a combination, they said, of the economy as well as their lack of research before embarking on a business about which they knew nothing.

Nor do they want to reveal exactly how much money they lost while the chance of finding an investor still exists. But they expect to feel the economic “ripples” of their foray into the magazine business for at least 10 years.

They moved from Chicago to Orange County 11 years ago, when Randall Jordan’s work transferred him here. Until last year, when he was laid off, he was a computer network specialist. The family’s financial problems were compounded when Joyce also was let go by her consumer health-care firm. She now works for a temporary service.

In February 1992, the couple decided to launch the Black Orange because they believed the county’s African American community needed a voice to fill a communication void, a medium to advertise events in the area and to discuss cultural issues.

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The magazine lists a range of events from NAACP meetings and business conferences to social mixers and art and music festivals.

Once in a while, Randall Jordan weighed in with editorials on issues that concerned local African Americans. He has commented on racial divisions at a South County school. He was also assailed for criticizing the investigation into the Christmas 1993 shooting death of a black Orange County sheriff’s deputy by a white fellow officer.

The Black Orange “could fill a niche here in Orange County because the black community doesn’t have another local voice they could turn to for information,” said Dawn Peck with the Service Corps of Retired Executives, a nonprofit organization sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Peck has been counseling the Jordans on ways to better run the magazine.

“The problem is there is a community out there, but it’s not visible, because [Orange County’s blacks] are not living geographically in one area,” Peck said.

To identify the market, the Jordans would need money for research to locate their potential readers and establish a mailing list of black residents in the area, Peck said. But money is exactly what the couple lacks.

With Peck’s help, the Jordans sent out a survey to their subscribers and advertisers in September to ask their opinions about the magazine. Overwhelmingly, the publishers said, respondents said the Black Orange is valued and needed.

Now, the couple pray that from Saturday’s meeting, a miracle will happen--that someone will step in to save the magazine.

“We gave up all of our security for something that was, at best, an entrepreneurial nightmare,” Randall Jordan said. “We don’t have anything else to lose.”

On their own, he added, “We don’t have anything else to save it.”