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HIP-HOP MEDIA DEVIL OR HIP-HOP ANGEL?: The Source's Dave Mays now has a 'Monsta' of a story to tell.
"Myself and my partner Benzino will continue to talk about issues that are important to the Hip-Hop community and to the impoverished communities of minorities in this country. We believe in that. What we put in our magazines we stand behind and we will continue to do so."
*Dave Mays, the founder and one time co-owner of "The Source," has experienced one heck of a fall from grace starting in 2006 when The Source Entertainment's board of directors terminated him from his position as that entity's CEO after revenues from the magazine suffered a sharp decline.
He was also alleged to have been run up on by Hip-Hop's official off wax ass-kicker Busta Rhymes. Couple that with the fact that the monthly mag's one-time editor, Kim Osorio, won a sexual harassment lawsuit against Mays and right hand man Ray Benzino resulting in a $8 million ruling in Osorio's favor and one could easily see how it could suck to be Dave Mays.
But things are looking up for the Harvard alum. He bounced back with a weekly mag appropriately christened "Hip-Hop Weekly" and just this week he launched a new monthly vehicle named "Monsta." Yes, it appears as though Mays is going to continue dancing with the lady that made him millions, selling ad space at premium prices.
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'Monsta' magazine's inaugural cover
As previously stated in this piece, Mays was forced out by board members largely over the company's debt. It's debt that Mays says began during the dot com boom of the 90s.
"I decided to take out a huge bank loan to invest in a dot com back when the dot com thing was going crazy," Mays told EUR's Lee Bailey. "The magazine was doing incredibly well. We had just launched the "Source Awards" on UPN so the business was taking off, and we were doing a few other things with the brand. I saw the internet (could possibly have) a lot of synergy to unite everything that I was doing. I borrowed in excess of 12 million dollars."
Just in case any of our readers were in a coma during the 90s, the Internet boom soon became the Internet bust. This left well-intentioned investors such as Mays holding the proverbial bag ... but it wasn't full of money. Just drama.
"I made a lot of mistakes," admitted Hip-Hop's first large scale publisher. "I lost a lot of money and put the company into financial instability. That led to a decision that I had to make around 2002 which was to sell the business. I was made an offer by a few people including Bob Johnson when he was still at BET. He had some magazine investments on the side. He offered me a lot of money to buy the company."
Mays says he turned down Johnson's offer to purchase "The Source" because he still wanted to have some say in the magazine that he created in what now seems like an eternity ago. This led to Mays selling a portion of the magazine to a private equity company, which in turn brought in its own bank to refinance the company's huge debt.
"They essentially set me up in a deal to take over the company," Mays told Lee Bailey. "I was very naive in dealing with banks and private equity funds. They put me in a deal where they could set me up and take the business from me and that was their plan. They felt they could run the company without me and they happened to be a company that was in the magazine business. There was a big fight when they tried to assert control over the magazine and the business and they won."
"Things happen for a reason," Mays continued. "On my end it happened to be a blessing in disguise. Right now I'm very happy with what I'm doing because it's giving me a chance to rebuild from scratch at a time when the world and business of magazine publishing is very different from when I started and built the company up. So I have a chance to restart it and build from a clean slate and do things smarter and in a more even handed way. On the flip side I think they learned 'The Source' was a product of me and (Benzino) for 20 something years. It was a product of our skills, our vision, our minds and it has not been very easy to maintain the level and success of the Source without our involvement. I think, by all accounts, the magazine has disintegrated over the past 2 years and it's barely on the radar now. They've learned that we were the life blood of that organization."
Now Mays is trying to transfuse that very life "blood" into his new endeavors.
"'Hip-Hop Weekly' is a celebrity, gossip type of magazine," explained Mays. "It's not going to take political stances, on cultural and social issues. 'Monsta' will be more the vehicle for that. I think 'Monsta' is a magazine, that people are starting to see from the first issue, is thought provoking. It's going to take on issues that are critical to our generation and to our people that are not being addressed in the media and I think it will become one of the most important journalistic vehicles of our time. Myself and my partner Benzino will continue to talk about issues that are important to the Hip-Hop community and to the impoverished communities of minorities in this country. We believe in that. What we put in our magazines we stand behind and we will continue to do so."
Standing behind something is one thing, putting up with it is something else entirely. But when that something is a person that has had your back for 20 years a dilemma arises. Ray Benzino has been at the heart of beef after beef over everything from his alleged tampering with The Source magazine's once vaunted mic rating system, to beef with Eminem over being rap's Elvis, to beef with 50 Cent and a slew of other rappers. Dave Mays steps up to bat and defends his boy in the next installment of our two part feature on the "Hip-Hop Weekly" and "Monsta" publisher.
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