Emil Wilbekin Ditches GIANT for Essence

Industry veteran, Emil Wilbekin has been named Managing Editor of Essence.com. Emil, best known for his 12-year tenure as Editor-in Chief of “Vibe” magazine, and more recently for his work as Editor-in-Chief of GIANT Magazine, will join Essence.com’s General Manager, Lesley Pinckney, to comprise the Essence.com leadership team. As Managing Editor, Emil will lead the [...]

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Interactive One Names Napster CTO David Wolfe as Chief Product and Operating Officer

Interactive One, parent company of BlackPlanet, NewsOne, TheUrbanDaily, HelloBeautiful, Elev8 and Giant announced today that Napster CTO David Wolfe has join as its Chief Product and Operating Officer. Wolfe will be responsible for the direction and strategy for Interactive One’s network of sites and brands. Additionally, he will be at the forefront of a unique [...]

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BlackPlanet Gets An Upgrade, Introduces Status Updates

Black Planet introduced a few new features a few days ago, and re-announced some others that have been in the works.  They included a Facebook-like feature that allows users to update their status, a revamped version of its chat rooms, and a news bar to that keeps readers updated on new content distributed through Interactive [...]

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Interview with Smokey Fontaine of Interactive One

In this episode of the Black Web 2.0 Show, we discuss content, the business of content, and entrepreneurship with Interactive One’s Chief Content Officer Smokey Fontaine. Smokey Fontaine has been a staple in the magazine industry for years, holding positions with such magazine giants (no pun intended) such as Vibe Magazine, The Source Magazine, and [...]

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The BlackPlanet Universe

Just last week we wrote about OnOne’s short life span and its entering the deadpool (theoretically).  Well, this week Interactive One has made distinct changes to further integrate the bevy of sites they recently launched into their recently acquired BlackPlanet.com.  You will notice that NewsOne, The Urban Daily, Hello Beautiful, and Giant are all now [...]

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OnOne Enters the Deadpool

Interactive One’s first foray into social networking, OnOne will be entering the dead pool on October 1st.  The death of OnOne is just a little house cleaning in preparation to unify the current OnOne users with Interactive One’s most recent acquisition, Black Planet. According to an email sent by the OnOne administrators, the “new and [...]

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BET launches 106 & Park Connect

Today BET will launch 106 & Park Connect in conjunction with 106 & Park’s 2,000th episode, the festivities which include special guests will occur sometime tonight around 6pm when the show airs.  The site is actually live right now and you can check it out for yourself at 106andPark.com.  The social network was built using [...]

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BlackPlanet.com is focused man…

On focus groups that is.  If you’re a member of BlackPlanet.com who actually reads their emails and doesn’t have them directed straight to your Spam box you may have gotten an email from them yesterday soliciting your participation in a focus group.  If you didn’t get the email, or just don’t read them, you may [...]

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Gorilla Nation Broadens Its African-American Reach

Online advertising rep firm Gorilla Nation recently signed four leading African-American Web properties to its GNMulticultural Vertical giving its advertisers access to 16 million unique visitors per month. The four sites added include, BlackPeopleMeet.com, BlackChristianPeopleMeet.com, BlackWebPortal.com, and Rap-Up.com. “The addition of these new AA properties now brings our GNMulticultural vertical to an estimated 13 million [...]

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Interactive One is not your average start-up

Smokey Fontaine, Chief Content Officer at Interactive One, describes the company as a “super start-up” in a quick interview with MarketWatch.  Thanks to Theo for the heads-up on this:

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