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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Saving The Source Magazine From Itself

Textron Financial Corporation, a Providence, R.I.-based lender and holder of the majority of stock controlling hip-hop magazine the Source is rumored to be close to finalizing its sale of the magazine. The perceived frontrunners for the assets and title of the magazine are Black Enterprise Greenwich Street Growth Partners, affiliated with Earl G. Graves Ltd's Black Enterprise magazine, and retired Rapper Jay-Z, with backing from a handful of recording executives.

The Source is a troubled title with a history of misfortunes to draw from as examples of their trouble (bad management, executives’ extreme misuse of assets, fighting at the Source Awards tapings to name a few). At one point, subscribers stop receiving the magazine by mail because their wasn't enough funding to pay postage.

But why save it? The Source was once considered the bible of hip-hop by all that mattered, and still is seen as a source of some of the finest information from the hip-hop world. Wouldn’t you like to have a head start in the information business, having a name that while not as prominent as it once was, at least conjures memories of profitable years as a name you could trust?

As a still young person, and an early die-hard follower of all things in the rap game, the chance to take a piece of history that may have grown out of favor, and to rehabilitate it, would be worth all the money I could find to out into it (assuming, of course, that I had the skills to fined a way to rehabilitate sales and revenue in the process). As I have made note of various print publications in previous posts, an push for some to evolve for the next age of the media, sometimes prematurely, even a magazine in severe disarray like the Source still has a decade's old core in place to draw from that would make a pretty good head start for many a publisher.

- The Source, Going Once... (New York Post)


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Comments on "Saving The Source Magazine From Itself"

 

Anonymous Anonymous said ... (12:15 PM) : 

The interesting thing to me about the situation for The Source, is that with plenty of traffic, solid content that provides a real value to it's readers, and an established network of advertisers, it is going for so little.

Indeed, it shows how badly corruption at the executive level (which floats down to middle management like a sewer line) can stifle a company. But why not, when we see what bad government can do to an entire nation.

I think the thing that you could add that has been lost, and would restore the assets and goodwill to their true value, is simply "Trust".

Once it is gone, things fall apart quickly.

 

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