“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, read more
things fell apart.
