Vibe, the late, iconic, urban music magazine that chronicled hip-hop culture, will return to newsstands in December. Despite the challenges of reviving it—shrinking advertising dollars, a leaner staff, and an unrelenting recession—new Editor in Chief Jermaine Hall can’t wait for readers to “sink their teeth” into the first quarterly issue.

“I keep asking myself, ‘Should I be this confident about it?’” Hall said, laughing, between meetings at Vibe’s new digs on 125th Street. “But I really feel good about it.”

Hall, named editor in August, has his lips sealed about who’s on the cover. “Man, my publishers would kill me if I told you,” he said. He said that his new staff—more than a dozen, including his own industry contacts, long-standing Vibe editors like Rob Kenner (who’s “never not been on the masthead” ), and “a decent amount of new talent” –are cranking out a print magazine with a broader focus on urban culture and building a comprehensive web site.

Vibe, which launched in 1993 as a joint venture between producer Quincy Jones and Time Warner, shut down in June after the Wicks Group, the private equity firm that owned it, failed to find new investors or shrink the magazine’s debt. Although most shuttered print magazines never make a comeback, Harlem-based Uptown Media Group, led by publisher and former Vibe executive Leonard Burnett, resuscitated Vibe in August. Burnett said it was worth the risk.

“Vibe had such an important legacy in its short 16 years. It was extremely important to keep that legacy,“ Burnett said. “A lot of advertisers thought hip-hop music was a fad. They underestimated the importance of the urban consumer and their savvy.” Vibe, he added, “wasn’t just the curator of rap, it was the curator of urban culture.”

Burnett helped launch Vibe, then left six years later to co-found urban publishing group Vanguarde Media. He returned to Vibe in 2005, then left again in 2007 to run Uptown full time. Now, he’s bringing the magazine he helped build uptown for a revival.

Vibe was a haven for young, talented journalists of color, he recalled, including Danyel Smith, who recently stepped down as executive editor at the Root.com, and Mimi Valdés Ryan, now editor in chief at Latina.

“Publishing is a hard industry to break into, period. And Vibe opened a lot of doors,” Burnett said.

He believes Hall “has the breadth of experience and passion” that is “necessary to bring the magazine back.” Hall previously edited King, a monthly magazine geared toward African-American men that shut down earlier this year. He was also music editor at the hip-hop magazine The Source and Vibe’s webmaster.

But how will Hall handle the pressure of bringing back a well-known brand, in print and on the web, with a tighter budget, leaner staff, and a tight December deadline? He said he’ll follow advice from Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair editor in chief, on how publishers should deal with a brutal industry.

“Carter basically said stop complaining about the ways things are,” Hall said. “So, I’m just going to try to put out a better product and let the product speak for itself.”

However, rescuing Vibe from its pile of debt in a tough ad market will prove challenging. Uptown Media Group declined to say just how much debt Vibe has, but ad pages at the magazine fell almost 40 percent this year compared to the magazine industry’s 28 percent decline, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Ulrich’s Periodical Directory reports that 54 consumer magazines closed last year and 65 in 2007. And according to Advertising Age’s The Last Page, a guide to magazine closings, only a few of those publications continue to live online.

Despite those odds, industry analyst Steve Cohn, editor in chief of Media Industry Newsletter, believes Vibe is strong enough to survive. “The economy is the factor and the only factor,” Cohn said. “If it were not for the recession, Vibe would still be here.”

Uptown Media Group and its fellow investors—InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm, and Blackrock Digital, an online media sales company—plan to revamp the magazine’s design, content, and business model, a web site statement said.

The magazine will appear quarterly, possibly increasing frequency next year, but the new owners are placing more emphasis on the web.

“We are going to put digital at the center spoke of our wheel,“ Burnett said. However, he assured that “print is not dead.”

“Our goal is to have our advertisers reach our consumers wherever they are,” Burnett continued. “They’re not reading magazines all day. They flow from media platform to media platform with ease. Whether Vibe is on the internet, on an iPhone, or in a magazine, Vibe has that same type of urgency.”

Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism, thinks Uptown will find success after “refocusing and rebuilding” Vibe digitally, but that “it is essential to have the print entity in order to keep the brand in front of the audience.”

“If you can’t exist in print,” Husni said. “You can’t exist on the web.”

Former Vibe research chief Lacey Banis doesn’t necessarily agree. “Web is where it is for tomorrow,” said Banis, who left her three-year stint at the magazine in 2007. “So, I think it’s an extremely intelligent move to have a digital focus.”

Now research editor at Lucky Magazine, Banis hopes that with strong digital and print platforms, Vibe will reclaim its status as a “cornerstone of our pop culture society.”

“There is no other magazine like Vibe. Period,” Banis said.

However, Burnett warns that even though he and his team will bring Vibe back, only urban readers can keep it on newsstands.

“One of our mantras is ‘power to the people’,” Burnett said. “We can’t let our media die. But if we don’t support it, we can’t cry about it when it’s gone.”