Disclosure: I wrote a couple album reviews for Vibe back in the day — I can't recall the word rate, but my twentysomething self was excited that a cool magazine would pay me to write 300 words on MC Solaar. Also, I was an editor at Rolling Stone for many years, but left before it was purchased by its current owner, PMC.

“Vibe magazine was the first true home of the culture we inhabit today,” wrote author Dan Charnas in Billboard, for Vibe’s 25th anniversary. It’s almost hard to imagine a time when a magazine could do that, but it was true. Founded in 1993 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, Vibe created a space where hip-hop, R&B and the culture around them was front and center, and receiving the benefit of high-end photography, art direction and editorial chops. It ran defining pieces on Tupac and Biggie, published the feature on street racing that inspired The Fast and The Furious and put Barack Obama on a magazine cover before most of America knew his name.

Over the years, Vibe has weathered multiple ownership shifts; the bleed of ad revenue into Google and Meta — like everybody else — and, since going digital-only in 2014, has looked more like a media asset than a cultural force, most recently under the umbrella of Penske Media Corporation (owner of RS, Billboard and Variety). It entered another phase last week, when RS CEO Julian Holguin announced that Vibe was "joining forces" with Rolling Stone. Vibe would "bolster Rolling Stone's hip-hop coverage," and there would be investments "across video, podcasts, long-form journalism, social media and experiential opportunities." By the time the announcement circulated, two Vibe staff writers had already posted that their positions had been eliminated; according to Billboard, Vibe will be hiring a “video/podcast host and an events producer.” The remaining Vibe staff are moving into the RS offices, per PMC staffers, and Vibe.com has gone from publishing 10 or more stories a day to a handful a week.

The precipitous drop in web traffic since Google’s AI summaries rolled out last year certainly played a role. In September, PMC announced last month that they are suing Google over what they say has been a 1/3 drop. The question now: is Vibe being ‘harvested’ — the ghoulish term for running a brand into the ground while monetizing what’s left (see: Sports Illustrated, countless local newspapers) — or will it be able to become part of the conversation again?

There is a point with many troubled media companies where the journalism that built the brand becomes a talking point rather than a reason to exist. Once you are on the wrong side of that inflection point, the downward spiral is hard to stop. Licensing and savvy brand management alone aren’t a viable strategy for media — unlike music, where catalog rights are booming. Making money off 30-year-old magazine covers is harder than licensing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” for one. More important, the basic value proposition of a good publication is that you will learn cool things, become a little more plugged-in, maybe a little smarter. That core value requires renewal and continued relevance. Without it, all of the spin-off FAST channels, awards shows, and collector’s editions that come with cultural currency will eventually go away. 

There might be a silver lining to the AI traffic disaster for Vibe: I’ve heard from inside media companies that aggregated news stories – the daily flood of low cost, unreported pieces summarizing other people’s exclusives and press releases — are one of the categories most affected by the decline. For years, those pieces made economic sense, because established brands were favored by Google’s algorithm; i.e. a rewritten news item from Vibe would be more likely to go viral than one from a lesser-known outlet because Vibe had more ‘SEO juice’.

That incentive seems to be fading fast. It could make more sense for Vibe to focus on exclusives and more interesting stories — pieces that tell us something new about hip-hop and R&B culture in 2025. Who knows; it might give that new video/podcast host something to talk about.