The True Story Behind The Crash Of King Magazine’s Empire

It was one of the “Illest Men’s Magazine’s in the world,” and it all came crashing down in 2009 due to low advertising sales. During a recent interview with Huffing Post, Datwon Thomas explains exactly what happened to the King Magazine empire, and how it became “The Women of King.”

According to the Huffing Post: “We need to talk about KING,” the Harris Publications exec told Datwon Thomas, editor-in-chief of XXL magazine and a founder and editorial director of KING, the men’s lifestyle magazine.

It was early 2009. The economy had tanked and the magazine industry was in a tailspin. Magazines were folding. Advertisers were in full-blown fallout mode. And KING had gone through several rounds of layoffs. The writing was on the wall.

The executive told Thomas that KING was unsustainable, that advertising dollars had slowed to a trickle and that the next issue, its 51st, would be its last. KING was done.

For nearly eight years, KING, the self-proclaimed “Illest Men’s Magazine Ever” had been Thomas’ baby and a jewel in the Harris Publications crown.

It was an urban answer to mainstream lad mags like Maxim, FHM and Stuff, and was the closest thing there had ever been to a hip-hop equivalent of GQ, with lavish fashion spreads, A-list celebrities and video vixens who bared their souls and just enough of their bodies to arouse the curiosity of readers. It was the print manifestation of barbershop talk with the fellas: sports, gadgets, cars and plenty of curvy and scantily clad women, alongside deeper investigative pieces written from the perspective of the urban everyman, with swagger and college-boy humor.

KING gained a cult-like following, at once celebrating beautiful women of color and feeding the fetishization of the black woman’s body.

“It was like your homeboy’s magazine,” Thomas said. “We took a bit of street savvy, wit, hood, academia — we took it all and just put it into this dope project. If you saw the covers, you’d be like, ‘All they want to do is look at this girl’s ass.’ But if you opened it, you’d be like, ‘Wow, it’s so much more than that.’”

In its first four years, KING’s circulation more than doubled, from 132,851 a year after it launched to 271,298 in 2005, making it one of the fastest-growing magazines in America at the time, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which tracks magazine sales. Then as the economy worsened, things fell apart.

But more than just shrinking ad revenue, it seems that ambition is what truly killed KING.

“For so long the publishers really didn’t want the magazine to be as robust as it was,” said Thomas, who is now the editorial director at Vibe. “I think the publisher really just wanted some girls. Throughout the years they would say, ‘Y’all sure you don’t want to just cut some of this stuff out?’ It was always that little nudge.”

While the brain trust behind the magazine — which included a roster of urban magazine wunderkinds, including Thomas and Jermaine Hall, KING’s last editor-in-chief — was pushing the magazine to be as balanced and well rounded as it could be, insiders say Harris Publications saw the clearest route to profit as the one that went across the bubbly behinds of the women featured in its pages. The fewer bells and whistles and the more prominently placed booty, the better.

“The book was flying off the newsstands,” said Hall, who is now Vibe’s editor-in-chief. Hall joined the staff at KING as executive editor after the third or fourth edition and served as its editor-in-chief from 2006 until it was shuttered. “I’m sure in their minds, if they could get us to be way less ambitious, the profit would have been a lot more. That ambition wasn’t cheap,” he said, noting the expense of talented writers, photographers and lush fashion spreads.

“If we would have dumbed it down the way they wanted it to be, then it would have been a lot more profitable,” Hall said. “Not that they weren’t making a lot of money off it. They were.”

This year would have been KING’s tenth anniversary. After shutting down, it re-emerged in the winter of 2010 as The Women of KING, a shell of its former self and little more than a picture book of T and A. The KING of the early to mid-2000s, its heyday, is now the stuff of lore.

Former editors, writers and people affiliated with the magazine talked to BlackVoices about the rise and fall of KING, their high hopes for it and its unrealized potential.

This is just a brief snippet of this article. To read the entire entry visit Huffington Post.com