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How Dave Mays and Benzino Got Back in the Game with Hip Hop Weekly
Step One: Take a page from the Bonnie Fuller playbook.

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Late one night in March 2006, Dave Mays was asleep in his New Jersey home when he received a phone call from Mr. Scott. They’d been kicking around start-up ideas, and Mr. Scott had had a eureka moment. “He said, ‘I got it!” Mr. Mays recalled. “And he broke down how there were all these celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People, and they were all successful but all featured the same group of people: basically, white celebrities. There was a void in the market.”

Their new magazine would come out twice a month. “We realized that the monthly magazine is a dying breed,” Mr. Mays said. “I’m sure you can do a monthly sewing magazine but with hip hop, there is shit happening every day, second and hour.”

They named it Hip Hop Weekly and began quietly publishing in late 2006. There was no lavish launch party, and the operation ran on a shoestring. Whereas The Source at its height had more than 80 full-time employees working out of a 20,000-square-foot office on Park Avenue South, Hip Hop Weekly works out of a small office in Miami and is put out by 10 part-time employees who mostly work from home. The website is run by a single part-timer. Photo shoots are a rare luxury.