Mavety Puts Gay Mags out of Their Misery

Can't say I am surprised. Can't say it'll make much difference in the publishing world. Can't say they'll be much missed, probably even by their regular readers. But Matthew Rettenmund blogs that Mavety Media Group canceled all of its gay magazine titles earlier today. And "gay magazine titles" here means magazines that were made up of nude pictures of men, erotic fiction, and porn ads ad nauseum. And that's it.

So the publishing world has lost such venerable titles as Mandate, Inches, Playguy, Honcho, and Torso. But before you sit shiva for these magazines, just think that they didn't really have anything to offer. As nothing more than porn mags, they really lacked anything with which to combat all of the free online porn out there.

Rettenmund, who besides being a very readable blogger and the author of Boy Culture and Blind Items: A Novel is also a veteran of the Mavety publishing world. He provides interesting background both on life inside the Mavety publishing family (such as the Christian ad sales rep) and on the gay magazine industry. It's almost enough to make one sorry to see these magazines go ... but no. They were a disappointment for anyone who's interested in what magazines can be when they really try.

But now everyone can trade up and subscribe to Winq, so there's an upside.

The Living Dead

There is no elephant grave yard for periodicals, no place magazines go when they prepare to die. As a recent visit to a San Francisco bookstore showed, magazines don't go away, even after cancellation. Some of them, at least, keep getting sold, and sold, and sold.





(Magazines in question: Best Life, Anime Insider, Starlog, and Portfolio.) They still live among us ...

Checking Your Portfolio

A day after the announcement that Portfolio magazine has been canceled, the blog and news worlds are filling up with people who are suddenly noticing the magazine.

BusinesWeek has an extended description of the big money behind this ambitious failure.

The Daily Beast's Tina Brown at least shares my view that the magazine's demise is a loss, not a reason for anti-print people to gloat.

The New York Observer reports that under different economic circumstances, the magazine might have survived; earlier, it at least had until 2010 to live or die, according to one source.

Blogger Erick Schonfeld get it wrong, I think. He says no one was reading the magazine and that long-form journalism is useless in an age when "business is about speed." Well, no, business is not primarily about speed. Certain aspects of it, perhaps; but if no one is reading in-depth examinations about the ways companies fail or survive or how regulation and markets work together, then that's a very sad (and disturbing and, frankly, three-alarm danger), because we're seeing very clearly these days the disastrous results of short-term-only thinking. Portfolio's different view on the matter was why I liked it. And nearly 450,000 readers is not a small amount. Big magazines typically take three or four years to reach a level of success; we'll never know what Portfolio could have done in a different economic cycle. Or how our economic cycle might have been better these days had more people paid attention to Portfolio.

David Kaplan at PaidContent.org offers some news in the form of a slim chance that portfolio.com might somehow survive the print mag's demise. That would probably make Schonfeld happy.

And James Ledbetter at The Big Money ponders how the magazine might have survived.