Erykah Badu: My tush? You couldn't handle my tush

Any suspicion that Erykah Badu's naked-on-the-knoll video was merely a publicity stunt designed to try and restart a career which had been sat for a while on the hard shoulder will now melt away as she tells Vibe it was actually just a political statement:

The singer also received backlash simply for disrobing in a video; online commentators suggested she was using sex to sell her music.

Badu scoffed at that notion, though.

"I look at some other videos. I'm not naming names, because I don't want that to be mentioned. There is the thing with sexuality," Badu told Vibe. "I'm naked for 13 seconds, and these people are naked the whole time and gyrating and saying come 'lick on my lollipop' and 'suck on my cinnamon roll' and, you know, suggesting sex. People are uncomfortable with sexuality that's not for male consumption. Could be 'cause I did it in public too. Do you think people would have been complaining if I had on high-heel shoes?"

Her protests are only slightly undermined by her whipping her clothes off for the cover of the Vibe as well. I expect that's there's some subtle point I'm missing.

Folding magazines: Vibe "saved"

Vibe magazine has been supposedly been saved.

Sort-of:

InterMedia Partners have purchased the brand, and plan to relaunch it through the creation of a "Vibe lifestyle network", reports allhiphop.com.

There are vague plans that there will also be a quarterly magazine somewhere down the line, but it all sounds a bit like the online "resurrection" of Woolworths from where I'm sitting.

Folding magazines: Vibe

It's been struggling for a while, but now the struggle is at an end: Vibe magazine is closing with immediate effect:

In a memo to staff members announcing the closure, Steve Aaron, chief of the Vibe Media Group, wrote that for months, the company tried in vain to either find new investors or “to restructure the huge debt on our small company.”

“The print advertising collapse hit Vibe hard, especially as key ad categories like automotive and fashion, which represented the bulk of our top 10 advertisers, have stopped advertising or gone out of business,” he wrote.

The most frustrating thing for the magazine is that its circulation wasn't too bad for the time; it's just there wasn't anything to sell to them.

Folding magazines: Vibe cuts back

While the UK music press posts slightly gloomy circulation figures, there's some equally glum news from the US: Vibe is cutting its frequency to 10 issues a year, putting staff on short hours, and cutting its circulation. (In other words, it's going to stop promising advertisers each issue will reach a certain number of issues and pitching for a lower level of take-up; In Vibe's case by 25%.)

In a bid to offset the loss, there's going to be "a twice-a-year newsstand-only celebrity tabloid." Which, unarguably, is trying something new in the face of the current market.