KING Folded in 2009. Smooth Didn't. The Difference Was the Ad Market.

Two of the three KING covers featured here happened after KING had already folded. KING magazine put curvier, video-vixen-adjacent Black women on its cover for years before "body positivity" existed as a marketing term — Buffie the Body among them, on a cover from its original run in 2005. Amber Rose and Rosa Acosta also covered KING, but later, in 2011 and 2010 respectively, after the magazine's 2009 closure, once Harris Publications had continued the name as a scaled-down quarterly. It launched under Harris Publications in the early 2000s — Wikipedia dates it to 2002 — founded by Datwon Thomas, who later became editor-in-chief of VIBE. KING built real national circulation during that original run: 132,851 in its first year, climbing to 271,298 by 2005, according to HuffPost's own reporting. Then, on March 31, 2009, it published its 51st issue — the last of that original run.

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That's the explanation on record, and it isn't a verdict on the covers or the content. It's a P&L problem: liquor, rims, and clothing advertisers, KING's core categories, pulled back hard as the 2008 financial crisis hit print ad budgets across the industry. KING's final editor-in-chief, Jermaine Hall, gives much the same account from the inside: "I was so focused on making that book into what I thought it should be. I think we all fought. At the end of the day, none of us owned KING magazine," he told HuffPost. Circulation wasn't the problem large enough to fold a national magazine over. The ad market backing that circulation was. Harris Publications did keep the KING name going afterward, as a scaled-down quarterly — HuffPost's own reporting, writing in 2011, called it "a shell of what the magazine was," not a real second act. That's where Amber Rose's and Rosa Acosta's covers actually ran, and it reads less like a rebuttal of the ad-collapse account than a continuation of it: a diminished brand surviving on a fraction of what the original required.

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Smooth, KING's less-chronicled counterpart, launched in 2002 under founder Sandra Vasceannie as a bi-monthly urban men's magazine, per its own Wikipedia entry. It spun off its own pictorial companion, Smooth Girl, built around the same pin-up-style models featured in Smooth itself. Where KING depended on a newsstand-based, ad-supported print model, Smooth's own website today runs on a different structure entirely. Checked directly on September 8, 2026, smoothmag.com shows no visible current publishing schedule, and its own "Current Issue" page returns a 404 when fetched directly. The most recently dated material findable on the site — image-upload timestamps on product listings — ranges from January 2023 to July 2025; nothing reads as an actively maintained editorial schedule. What the site operates now is a membership store, plans starting at $4.99 a month, selling access to an existing photo and video library rather than selling ad pages against a newsstand run. Smooth outlasted KING. It didn't do it by staying the same business.

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Vasceannie is the harder figure to document. A search for her name turns up no dedicated Wikipedia page of her own — only Smooth's own magazine entry, a Getty wire photo captioning her as the magazine's publisher, a Better Business Bureau listing, and Amazon issue listings crediting her as author and publisher. Thomas, whose magazine folded, has an author page on VIBE.com and has given on-record interviews to Black Enterprise and the New Pittsburgh Courier about his career. Vasceannie, who built the business that survived and appears to still be running it, does not have the same public record. That's a documented absence, not an explanation of it. But it's a real one, and it says something about which founders in this category get remembered and which don't.

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The record supports two readings at once, and neither cancels the other. The representation reading: these magazines gave curvier, fuller Black women commercial visibility, real circulation, and national newsstand distribution that the era's mainstream glamour magazines denied them. The objectification reading, documented in the broader critical literature on the 2000s "video vixen" economy: both were still men's magazines built around women's bodies for a male audience, without the models holding editorial control over how those bodies were used. Nothing in either magazine's own record resolves which reading is correct, and this isn't the place to adjudicate it. What the record does resolve is the business question: KING's collapse and Smooth's pivot into a subscription-only afterlife are two different endings to the same underlying pressure, a print ad market that could no longer support one version of this business, and a company that re-engineered around it instead of folding. Twenty years before body positivity had a hashtag, the commercial case for curves already had a paying, national audience. It just didn't have an advertiser reliable enough to keep every version of it in print. Put those two facts side by side: the founder whose magazine failed has an author page and an interview trail; the founder whose business survived is barely documented at all.