Who really owns the new Vibe?

Crap, it looks like Vibe won't be gone for good.

Yesterday, there was a rumor on RapPravda that someone might be trying to buy the Vibe name and bring it back as a website, and today it's being widely reported that some company did in fact buy Vibe, and that a new Vibe site could be back online by the end of the week. What's more, they're gonna start publishing a quarterly print version of Vibe by the end of the year, and it could be back monthly in a couple of years. Oh noes!

Even though it could suck like the new Source, I'm assuming this isn't a matter of some black guy with a shedload of money trying to cop his own magazine, for vanity purposes, like when that Mexican was trying to cop the New York Times. Otherwise, why let it go completely go out of business and then try to bring it back as a website, as if that was a good idea, when you could have just as easily put your bid in back when it was announced that they couldn't get anyone to advertise in Vibe other that the US Army and Luster's Pink Oil Moisturizer.

If I would have been thinking, I would have called the Vibe offices and taken out an ad for my own site. I wouldn't have given them any more than $100 (not that I could, if I wanted to), but that should have been all it would take. How in the fuck were they gonna turn down money, when they were a mere matter of weeks from going out of business. It could be that they had some policy against running ads from competing media organizations, in which case maybe I would have turned it into a personal. I'm sure a lot of the girls who read Vibe would have been impressed that I could afford my own full-page ad.

But I digress.

A few black guys who worked at Vibe at some point or another have been named the new management regime, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're just nominal figureheads. There's a press release I saw a few hours ago that lists the names of the companies that own Vibe now, and I'm assuming they're somehow ultimately owned by either the Chinese, or Arabs, who have enough money to just randomly buy American media institutions. I read just the other day that the Chinese bought the Onion, which was having business problems. This could very well be the same chinamen.

The dead giveaway is the fact that they plan on having the site back online so soon, despite the fact that hardly anyone works there. In the same article where it says they're trying to have the site back online by the end of the week, it says that any of the poor bastards who worked for the old Vibe are invited to apply for a position with the new Vibe. So apparently, they plan on hiring a buncha people and having them crank something out by Friday, which is, like, a 48 hour turnaround. That's the kind of efficiency usually reserved for cranking out Michael Jackson tribute t-shirts and the like - which lends credence to my theory that the Chinese might be involved.

In fact, it could be that the black guys in charge were the former Vibe employees they were looking to employ, and the content is being cranked out as we speak by a room full of slaves over in Hong Kong. We'll know for certain Friday, if the content is riddled with grammatical errors, as if it was from AllHipHop, and there's a story about Night Ranger, for no apparent reason. Mark my words.