As the first female Editor In Chief of the Source Magazine, Kim Osorio had her work cut out for her. The hip-hop journalist had been with the magazine, dubbed the bible of hip-hop, for just two years before rising to the top editorial spot on the masthead. Once she got there, she was determined to take the magazine to new heights, all while fulfilling her passion of writing and editing in a musical culture that she’d grown to love. But while she was leading the editorial vision which resulted in the highest selling issue of the publication’s history, she was dealing with the internal drama that comes along with being a woman in power at a magazine that documented a music that was slowly turning into a misogynistic culture.
Osorio, who holds a J.D. from New York Law School, has devoted ten years to hip-hop publishing, transitioning from print to online media in 2005 when she became the Executive Editor at BET.com. At BET, she spread her wealth of knowledge of music to the online community and helped establish BET.com as one of the go-to sites for music news. She also brought her reporting skills to the television screen as an on-air correspondent for BET News Briefs and BET’s successful entertainment show, “The Black Carpet.â€
Kim Osorio is the newly appointed VP of Content at Russell Simmons’ Global Grind website (www.globalgrind.com), a website is on pace to become the leading media company in the hip-hop space. She has been an invited speaker at many colleges across the country, having delivered the keynote speech at NYU’s Latin Student Association’s La Herencia Latina and Bronx Borough President’s Adolfo Carrion’s Women’s History Month luncheon. In 2004, she was featured on the cover of the New York Post’s Tempo section, and voted one of the top 25 influential Latinos in New York. A Fordham University alumnus, she also mentors students to help guide them in their own career choices. She has been featured as an expert in hip-hop on television shows such as “The O’Reilly Factor,†BET’s “Hip-Hop Vs. America,†and Fox News’ “The Big Story with John Gibson.â€
Always one to defend hip-hop in the mainstream, Kim has faced some challenges of her own within the culture. Widely known for filing one of the biggest lawsuits in the history of hip-hop, Kim Osorio sued the Source Magazine in 2006 and was victorious. The jury found that she was unlawfully fired for filing a complaint of gender discrimination, and that the owners at the company had defamed her as well. This September, she will release her personal memoir, entitled Straight From The Source, to officially set the record straight.
