TheLoop21.com

The lesson in the death of Vibe Magazine

Media — black media in particular — is having a hard time making it through the recession. First the trouble with Ebony and Jet, then the closing of King magazine and RushmoreDrive.com, an online black search engine, and now Vibe, created in 1992 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, is also closing its doors — effective immediately.

People have debated the relevance of Ebony and Jet, the magazines that were always on your grandmother's coffee table growing up, and attributed that to their losses, but the closing of Vibe is actually a shock. The magazine focuses (or focused) primarily on hip-hop and R&B music, two genres that aren't going anywhere. (Black music magazines aren't the only ones in trouble. Blender folded last year, and even Rolling Stone's ad pages were down 22 percent this year.)

Vibe's closing is just another example of something we already knew — print is out. News is online now, and black media organizations, just like mainstream media organizations, are going to have to jump on board, or else, one by one, they'll fade away.

We're hearing already that Quincy Jones is looking to save Vibe in some capacity by keeping it online. That's a step in the right direction, but it's not a solution to the big picture problem everyone's ignoring.

Black media like Vibe are necessary, but if they're going to survive — online, offline, in any form — they're going to have to broaden their scope beyond the limits of what advertisers think black people are interested in. There are many other entertainment-focused black Web sites online, so what would make a new, online-only Vibe different from a site like AOL's Black Voices? Hip-hop alone is not going to save Vibe.

Crystal P. Smith is TheLoop21.com's editor. She writes the Inside the Loop blog.

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