The Source, which was in bankruptcy utmost year, is relaunching with a 20th-anniversary issue and a new focus - a focal point that its co-publisher says will restore the magazine, once known as hip-hop's bible, to prominence.
"It's a very originative period, an opportunity to both lionise 20 years of content and the fact that The Source was a leader in chronicling the culture of hip-hop," aforesaid L. Londell McMillan, a media and entertainment lawyer who, along with investment banker Jeffery Scott, purchased The Source earlier this year.
"I'm on a foreign mission to reinstate it to the community that gave birth to it and open the door to those that currently enjoy and influence that rap culture," he added. "It's exciting because we trust that we can do it."
The new issue, which hits newsstands next workweek, features four separate covers of hip-hop pioneers LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah and Nas, photographed by director Spike Lee.
"We shared with him what we were stressful to do, the vision of hip-hop and where we thought it needful to go, and he thought it was bracing and cunning," McMillan aforementioned of Lee, a client.
Inside, the cartridge holder takes a weightier tone, including a discussion with prominent professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, led by Public Enemy's Chuck D.
"We're just going to expand on what The Source has incessantly done well," said McMillan, adding that music volition be "a core stress but non 80 per centum of the book."
He aforementioned the magazine will possess a "multigenerational" focus, and will include sections on lifestyle, travel, education, business and other topics.
"I think that what we're trying to do is evolve it as hip-hop has evolved and become an international military unit, to evolve it without losing its core core that was the centerpiece of its earliest beginnings and illustriousness. But it has to evolve, barely like rap has to evolve," McMillan said.
At its prime, The Source was the leading magazine for rap, and it helped fuel the rise of urban magazines such as XXL and Vibe, which celebrated its 15th anniversary this week.
But over the last few years, The Source ran through a series of editors, had financial problems and suffered a decline under the ownership of Mays and Raymond "Benzino" Scott; the pair were fired in 2006 and subsequently launched Hip-Hop Weekly, an Us Weekly-like magazine chronicling the lives of urban euphony stars. When the magazine filed for bankruptcy, it was millions of dollars in debt.
One magazine analyst said that while the magazine has been injure by its problems, it is inactive viable.
"It is a force. Nobody can deny the force or the power of The Source. But is it the same as it was little Phoebe years agone? No," aforesaid Samir Husni, journalism chair at the University of Mississippi. "It does not deliver with the same punch that it used to."
Husni said the magazine's new owners faced an uphill battle in their relaunch, simply could be successful "if they are true to the DNA of the publication."
McMillan and Scott purchased The Source late last year through and through The North Star Group and Black Enterprise/Greenwich Street, respectively.
McMillan aforesaid that over the past few years, the magazine publisher had focused so much on rap, it had excluded other reader interests.
"It left off so practically of what is the key ingredients of rap music and modus vivendi now ... which is life style, fashion, on-line, new media, international aspects of how people embrace content."
The magazine is searching for a new editor in chief. Besides a shift in content, it will as well undergo a design relaunch, McMillan said.
"If anything we want to restore it, restore it to enormousness and its No. 1 spot," he said.
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