Hip-Hop is Not Dead: Vibe Magazine Finds New Owner

Last night, Ad Age's Nat Ives broke the news that Vibe was being resurrected after being shuttered in June, confirming that this is, in fact, the week of good media news.

The buyers are a group that includes InterMedia Partners, owners of Uptown Media, publishers of Uptown magazine.

Vibe, which launched in 1993 by Time, Inc. in partnership with super-producer Quincy Jones, changed hands a number of times over the years before its last owners, the Wicks Group (which bought the publication and its Web site for a reported $35 million in 2006) experienced a 40-percent decline in ad pages.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new owners will bring Vibe.com back online in a few weeks; the magazine will be published as a quarterly in 2010. There's no word if Danyel Smith, the magazine's final editor, will return. In an interview with the Web site Baller Status in July, Smith said, "It's sad. I don't know where those stories are gonna be told in the way they were told in Vibe. I don't know where that is."

In July, Harry Allen, an early contributor to the magazine, offered a haunting post about visiting Vibe's offices in the days after it was closed on his Media Assassin Web site:

I walked past the archive, with almost every edition of the magazine ever printed, as well as the young woman-focused VIBE Vixen’s entire run, on its shelves. I walked more, saw a conference room, and sat down.

There was a sheet of papers with fine lines and columns on it, so I picked one up. It was the outline of the entire September issue, the 2009 Juice issue, that, now, will not be printed. Planned was a series of short profiles on 'The New Music Industry'; people like Karen Kwak, sr. VP of A&R at Def Jam; Josh Deutsch, CEO of Downtown Records; stylist Mariel Haenn; gossip blogger Nicole Bitchie, and others. Their 'Best Rapper Ever' spread.

Allen revealed that Vibe's next cover—which never saw print—would have been Lil Wayne and Kobe Bryant.