Vanguarde Media said it is pulling the plug on 10½-year-old Emerge, billed as black America’s news magazine, and laying off its Washington, D.C.-based staff.
Insiders say the company plans to launch a new general interest lifestyle title for blacks next spring – but it will be called Savoy and be based in New York.
George Curry, editor-in-chief of Emerge for seven years – and the reigning president of the American Society of Magazine Editors – is among those out of work.
Reached yesterday, he said he’s looking for backers to give the Emerge concept another go. “If I could find the funding over the next few weeks to do a magazine similar to Emerge, I’d do it in a minute,” said Curry.
He said the biggest problem that the magazine had was that there was never enough money for promotions aimed at boosting circulation. In the second half of 1999, its paid circulation fell 5.7 percent to 152,870, while the newsstand portion of the sales collapsed – tumbling 36.7 percent to 20,623.
Curry says the magazine was turning its first profit since its launch this year. However, Roy S. Johnson, editorial director of Vanguarde, said the decision to put Emerge on hiatus was “a business decision based on past performance.”
Industry sources estimate the magazine was marginally unprofitable, with losses of about $1million in 1999. In that year, BET Holdings became a major investor in Vanguarde Media, and Vanguarde’s CEO Keith Clinkscales took over management of Emerge.
The magazine was actually started by Time Inc. in 1990 by Wilmer Ames and sold to Black Entertainment Television two years later and moved from New York to Washington.
As for the re-launch – or new launch – of Savoy, Veronica Chambers, a 29-year-old general editor at Newsweek, said she has already been hired to be the executive editor of the new title. “I expect it to be called Savoy,” she said.
The name comes from a project that Johnson had championed for years inside Time Inc., first when he was at Sports Illustrated and more recently while he was editor-at-large at Fortune.
The top brass at the media giant never gave the project the go ahead, and Johnson jumped ship this year to be editorial director of Vanguarde – teaming up with Clinkscales, another Time Inc. veteran, who had helped launch Vibe.
The shutdown of Emerge marks the second title aimed at a black audience to fold recently. Miller Publishing last month said it was closing Blaze, a hip hop music magazine.