Vibe Magazine Folds, Immediately

Vibe is closing immediately, a day before the music/urban magazine's 16th anniversary.

Tracy Nguyen, the company's spokeswoman, said the Vibe staff was formally notified this afternoon. She said she did not know how many people would be laid off as a result of the closure.

The closure of Vibe leaves just two large-circulation music magazines, XXL and The Source, focusing on hip-hop and R&B. The Source has had its own troubles, going through a bankruptcy and emerging under new ownership last year. A rock-focused magazine, Blender, folded last year.

In a memo to staff members announcing the closure, Steve Aaron, chief of the Vibe Media Group, wrote that for months, the company tried in vain to either find new investors or “to restructure the huge debt on our small company.”

“The print advertising collapse hit Vibe hard, especially as key ad categories like automotive and fashion, which represented the bulk of our top 10 advertisers, have stopped advertising or gone out of business,” he wrote.

Danyel Smith, Vibe's editor-in-chief, released this statement:
On behalf the VIBE CONTENT staff (the best in this business), it is with great sadness, and with heads held high, that we leave the building today. We were assigning and editing a Michael Jackson tribute issue when we got the news. It’s a tragic week in overall, but as the doors of VIBE Media Group close, on the eve of the magazine’s sixteenth anniversary, it’s a sad day for music, for hip hop in particular, and for the millions of readers and users who have loved and who continue to love the VIBE brand. We thank you, we have served you with joy, pride and excellence, and we will miss you.

Update:
Quincy Jones is hoping to buy back the magazine. In a conversation with Ebony magazine's Senior Editor Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, he said:

"I'm trying to buy my magazine back now. They just messed my magazine all up, but I'm gonna get it back. You better believe it, I'm'a take it online because print and all that stuff is over."

Jones says that all publications must figure out how to live online. That's where he's going to take Vibe once he recovers from the death of his friend and protégé Michael Jackson.

"We gotta get into the 21st century you know," Jones said. "Print and all that stuff is over, we gotta remember that. The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Post Intelligencer. The Miami Herald. They're over the same way as the record business. We have got to get into this century."

While Jones sees an online-only presence as the future of VIBE, the magazine's Web site was already robust and, according to its CEO, profitable. Industry analysts say that without the burden of paying for the printed page, there might be a digital opportunity for VIBE if the brand's name and archives could be bought without having to assume the company's debt.



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