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Fort Wayne's Black community built its own press because the dailies were not built for it. The catalog record is thin at the start — the Library of Congress list of Indiana's African American newspapers attests a Fort Wayne Observer, a weekly, from the 1900s with surviving evidence from 1955 — and becomes full in the 1960s. The Coffee Break, a weekly published by Joe H. Andrews, survives in issues from 1968 and 1969. The institution that defined the field was Frost Illustrated, founded in 1968 by publisher Edward N. Smith — Fort Wayne's oldest weekly newspaper of any kind by the time it closed, and for forty-nine years the Black community's paper of record. Smith set the Frost apart from its three original competitors by photography: it was the illustrated paper, marketing itself as an "image paper," its pages full of the church socials, graduations, and street scenes the dailies did not print. In 1969 it carried Lost Family, a comic strip by the African American cartoonist Grass Green. The Frost's final issue covered October 11–24, 2017.
The succession was immediate and deliberate. Ink, a weekly published from 2001 by the Diversity Media Group of siblings Vince Robinson and Terri Miller, had already shown the model at scale — a reported weekly readership above 9,500, distributed free through more than a hundred Black churches in Fort Wayne, Kokomo, and Marion — before ceasing in 2009. When the Frost folded, John Dortch, president of the Fort Wayne Black Chamber of Commerce, founded the Fort Wayne Ink Spot News, publishing its first issue on March 12, 2018: eight pages, dedicated to Edward N. Smith, staffed largely by Frost alumni, with Dortch insisting the new paper begin "standing on Edward Smith's shoulders." The Ink Spot publishes biweekly in print and online — the only African-American-owned newspaper in northeast Indiana, with a circulation of about 1,000 as of 2019 — edited in its early years by Bryant Rozier and from 2020 by managing editor Fred McKissack, a veteran of the St. Louis American. Its remit, in Dortch's founding statement, is education, employment, and entrepreneurship, and the positive record of the community the dailies too often cover only in crisis. The Black community's institutions are in the Communities chapter; its papers are how that community has talked to itself for a century.
Sources: List of African American newspapers in Indiana (Library of Congress catalog data: the Fort Wayne Observer; Coffee Break and publisher Joe H. Andrews; Frost Illustrated LCCN sn87055965); Frost Illustrated reference history (1968 founding; Edward N. Smith; the photography pitch; Grass Green's Lost Family, 1969; final issue October 11–24, 2017); Ink reference history (2001–2009; Diversity Media Group; circulation and church distribution); Fort Wayne Ink Spot reference history and Fort Wayne Black Chamber of Commerce (March 12, 2018 first issue; the Smith dedication); Input Fort Wayne (June 2020) (Fred McKissack's managing editorship).