A renegade-to-riches story at Vibe

Vibe is the fastest-growing music magazine in history, and now the second-largest music publication in the country behind Rolling Stone, and Alan Light had a backstage pass to its success.

When I was named editor-inchief of Vibe magazine in June 1994, I was told I had three issues by which to produce a significant increase in our newsstand sales-or we would be shut down by our Time, Inc. owners. And by the way, I was asked, could I cut the editorial budget in half, too?

My career as a journalist (four years spent at Rolling Stone and a year as Vibe's music editor at that point) had taken me a lot of places-on stage with Prince while he rehearsed, in the recording studio with the Rolling Stones, barhopping in Dublin with U2-but nowhere that remotely prepared the not-quite-28-year-old me for a challenge like this.

Vibe was launched in 1993 as a joint venture between Time, Inc. and Quincy Jones to address the generation that had grown up with rap, hip hop, and other urban music as the soundtrack to their lives. When Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967, he was responding to a community for whom rock and roll was more than just pop music-it was the force that shaped their politics, their fashion, their whole way of life. Now there was an opportunity for us to speak to those for whom hip hop functioned in a similar way, and record sales made it clear that these listeners were a genuinely multicultural, male and female, teen and older group in the multimillions that was growing every year.

Headaches by the number

The problem was, after a great deal of media hoopla when we debuted, sales of the magazine were not where we needed them. We launched with a circulation of 100,000 and cautiously took it up to 200,000 after six months-but we were struggling to deliver that number. All of our editors, including myself, spent that first year feeling out some of the parameters of our coverage, and we still hadn't really found our sharpest focus or strongest editorial mix. Our founding editor-in-chief, Jonathan Van Meter, had an argument with Jones about cover selection, decided that he couldn't present the vision of Vibe he wanted, and left in May of 1994. A few days later, the powers that be approached me about taking over the reins.

I protested at length. I was just a writer-I had grown up in a newspaper office trailing my mother, a dance critic in Cincinnati; studied pop-music history as an American Studies major at Yale; and parlayed my interests into a job at Rolling Stone. I had worked my way up to a senior writer title there, covering hip hop extensively and sometimes dipping into other territories before coming to Vibe. I hadn't edited a story in my life before taking the music editor position. But I believed so much in the importance of a magazine like Vibe, a place that would take this music and culture, so often denigrated in the mass media, as seriously as it deserved, that I agreed to accept th editor-in-chief job-at least for a while.

So then came the hard part. How do you harness all the potential in a young, renegade magazine and get it to the reader? (Please note: something like three-quarters of all new magazines don't even survive, much less succeed.)

The first, and most critical, decision for Vibe was relatively obvious: we needed to make our music coverage as flawless, timely, and sharp as possible-that was our franchise. It was this focus that made us stand out from every other magazine out there. But we had been casting our net a little too widely that first year, emphasizing culture stories and trying to draw in too many disparate styles of music under our net-wellintentioned but ultimately confusing to the reader. If we could really fine-tune our selection of which urban music artists to cover, when, and at what length-and most specifically, our choice of cover subjects-we could get where we needed to go.

Outcooling the customer

My first move was to hire Danyel Smith, a frequent contributor to the magazine (my favorite writer we had, in fact) and a former editor at Billboard and San Francisco Weekly, to replace me as music editor. We worked very closely to hone our music coverage. And largely, this meant opening up our ears and paying attention to what people were actually listening to, as opposed to what we wanted them to be listening to. It's very easy, and very dangerous, to edit a magazine that will impress your friends instead of your readers-and sometimes it's hard to remember that those of us in or around the music biz, and in New York, can be months ahead of the tastes of the rest of the country.

There is such a thing as "outcooling" your readers, and I think Vibe was often guilty of that in our early days. I figure that if 75 percent of our coverage is the stuff that people are already listening to and liking, even writing about it critically, they'll trust you on the 25 percent that they might not be familiar with. But if that balance gets out of whack, they might not even understand what you're talking about, no matter how great the staff thinks a new record is.

Sometimes commercial consideration for covers meant compromising the perfection we strove for. Janet Jackson, for example, gave us an interview but wouldn't sit for a new photo shoot, a usual requirement for a cover, while R&B star R Kelly, in the middle of a sex scandal, sat for a quick photo shoot but cancelled his interview at the last minute. Both of these stories, even if flawed, were of great interest to our readers, and both did end up on the cover (whether the subjects liked it or not) and sold very well.

I also felt it was necessary to pay greater attention (and devote more pages) to Vibe's smaller stories in the news and arts sections. I believe that readers feel very strongly about the short pieces in magazines, especially the standing columns; if you can give readers three things they know they like every month, no matter how small those things, they will come back month after month. It took going through a few section editors and moving some staff around, but the sections started getting stronger, punchier, more fun and more informative.

Newsstand sales, which are almost entirely contingent on cover subject and treatment, began to climb. And, at least as gratifying, we were starting to see recordbreaking results in response to subscription cards (those annoying little postcards that fall out of magazines). It meant that we were getting new readers and keeping them, that when people picked up Vibe, they were liking what they got so much that they wanted to subscribe-a kind of reader loyalty that advertising can't buy.

So we were starting to turn a corner commercially, and Time, Inc. kept us alive for the time being. Cutting budgets, though, was another matter entirely, especially for someone whose last math class was in tenth grade and who had never taken an economics class in his life. But our CEO and publisher were both very patient and understanding, helping me trim where I could and knowing when to back off with items that I just could not cut.

The key, not surprisingly, was prioritizing. Our photo budget, for instance, had gotten out of control, since we were trying to shoot everything in every issue. I had to start by determining the spots where we simply could not compromise.

The most essential visual components of the magazine were the cover shoot, cover story, and fashion pages-obviously not the areas to cut back. But smaller stories, even smaller features, could maybe get by with art provided by the record label, movie studio, or whomever. It wouldn't be as nice as doing our own photo sessions, but I felt that it wouldn't hurt us too badly with our readers-which had to be the criterion that drove every decision. Piece by piece, we whittled the budget down to something more manageable over a few months.

The hardest part of all of my editor-in-chief responsibilities, was effectively managing our 25-person editorial staff. Putting out a magazine about urban music and culture demands a unique blend of employees; "career" magazine types simply couldn't put the energy into the pages that Vibe needs. We had to have a young voice, plugged into the clubs and streets-people for whom Vibe was their first job, and writers who slept on editors' couches or didn't have telephones. But then, when we were fighting for our life, it doubtless also led on my part to too much coddling of staff members who were simply being unprofessional in ways that were destructive, not just unconventional.

Coddling or coaching?

There's no question that my hardest battles, practically and psychologically-and my biggest regrets-come from this element of my leadership.

My motives are easily explained: We needed the input of writers with street credibility then more than ever. There had never been a magazine like this before, so how was I supposed to prepare for such conditions. And besides, my personality was never demanding or dictatorial, even though you need some of that to run a magazine.

I'm still not sure, however, which of my motives were right and which were wrong. My style was much more about encouragement and support rather than discipline. I feel that, ultimately, I was thinking too short term, trying to keep people happy even when they needed me to act with more authority, at the expense of our long-term well-being as a business.

Understand: For this staff, this was not just about writing and editing stories for a paycheck, this was a cultural war we were fighting, attempting to right society's wrongs and win this music the respect it has never gotten. Also, given the culture we cover and the composition of our staff, issues of race were also never far from the surface of our mission-nor should it have been-which also led to conflicts inside and outside the office on a regular basis.

Frequently, I found myself reminding the staff that every day we showed up for work, we were making history-there had never been a magazine of this magnitude being put out by such a blend of races and gender, and by a staff so young, ever before. We had to produce: people of color are scandalously under-represented in the print media, and once we started taking off, the whole world was watching and waiting for us to fail.

I would not have had any of this any other way. We absolutely needed that sort of passion to give Vibe the intensity, informed voice, and sense of purpose that we had to have if we were going to convince our readers we were the real deal. But on a more personal level, it was exhausting, confusing, and often demoralizing to attempt to harness all that swirling emotion every single day and capture it on the pages every month.

Meanwhile, things were certainly working for the outside world. That initial burst of increased sales was not slowing down. From that rate base of 200,000 readers in 1994, we started 1995 at 250,000; we outperformed that number and went up to 275,000 in midyear. A spectacular growth spurt took us all the way up to 400,000 in 1996. After another conservative estimate of 450,000 for 1997, we recently announced an increase to 600,000 for 1998.

Vibe is the fastest-growing music magazine in history, and now the second-largest music publication in the country behind Rolling Stone. And the jump in sales, combined with all that budget-trimming (on the business side as well as editorial) resulted in the magazine reaching profitability in an astonishing three years. (Five years is the assumed minimum for any national magazine to have a break-even year.)

We have also been nominated several times for National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest honor. A handful of editorial coups, including Prince's first interview in five years, a fashion story with Michael Jackson, and a world exclusive with Tupac Shakur when he was incarcerated in Riker's Island in 1995, forced the magazine world to stand up and take notice. In the words of the group Public Enemy, Vibe has proven, in ways that no other magazine ever has, that we can "reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard."

The strength of our editorial focus has also allowed us to extend our brand name in multiple directions, especially since we bought our independence from Time, Inc. in 1996. We developed the Vibe Music Seminar, an industry conference, in 1995; published an illustrated biography of Tupac Shakur with Crown publishing in 1997 that ended up on the New York Times best-seller list; and "Vibe," a syndicated nightly national talk and entertainment television show, debuted in August 1997.

The rest of the story

In early 1997, I started to feel that my stint as editor-in-chief should start winding down. I missed writing too much, and the pressures of running a magazine with a half-million circulation are vastly different from those of running a scrappy, underdog upstart with sales of 200,000.

We needed a new injection of energy and someone who could increase the level of professionalism and productivity, and I knew that that wouldn't be me-my relationships with the staff were what they were, having been formed under very different conditions, and I wasn't going to alter them overnight.

Quite simply, I was getting tired, and I wanted to make a change before I started making sloppy decisions. My (again, very understanding) superiors were sympathetic, and we created an editor-at-large title that has allowed me to stay at the magazine and return to the writing that is my real love, develop more book projects for the magazine (I recently started work on The Vibe History of Hip Hop, something I've wanted to spearhead for years), and work on other special projects.

To my great pleasure and relief, Danyel Smith made the same jump I did, from music editor to the big chair, in July of 1997. I wouldn't trade the years spent running Vibe for anything, but it's exciting to get back to worrying about managing the thing I'm most comfortable and familiar with: myself.

Alan Light's writing has appeared in Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, album liner notes, the Rolling Stone

Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (Little Brown), Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Duke University Press), the Rolling Stone Files Anthologies (Hyperion), and the World Book Encyclopedia.

Light has discussed issues relating to music and culture on numerous television and radio programs, including "The Today Show," "CBS This Morning," "Entertainment Tonight,"and "Extra. "

Copyright Association for Quality and Participation Jan/Feb 1998
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