Media Roundup: Wednesday Comics, Starlog Contests, and Playboy & Gayness

The latest from the world of media (with an emphasis on print):

• I just discovered a blog by my friend and former colleague from Internet World, Ruhan Memishi. It's called Media Musing, and it's a good addition to your reading list. Apparently, she's quite obsessed with her iPhone these days.
• Lo and behold, another former Internet World colleague of mine, Brian Caulfield, will be appearing at The Commonwealth Club, where I work. Brian is now a Forbes senior technology editor, and on November 9 he will be on a panel discussing "Tech Toys for the Holidays: Must-Have Gadgets to Give and Get." It'll take place in Silicon Valley. Go to the event. Maybe ask him about being an altar boy when he was a kid. (For the sake of clarity, my views on this blog are always mine and mine alone, not my employer's).
• So that's why I'm gay: By now, you've probably already heard about the conservative wingnut who declared that all pornography is gay and that reading Playboy makes you gay. He then said no 11-year-old boy would even think about reading a Playboy if he was told that it made him gay. Frankly, even an 11-year-old boy is smart enough to know his parents are nuts if they tell him such a thing. But now the temptresses at Playboy have admitted it's all true and that they've been caught red-handed.
• To sort of maintain that theme here, blogger Matthew Rettenmund has an item about his former employer, adult gay magazine publisher Mavety. As the gay periodicals drop like flies, I'm left with the impression that there are a lot of good stories to tell behind those scenes. Now we need a right-wing nut to convince people that reading gay pornographic magazines makes you straight -- that'd probably boost the circulation of the remaining titles.
• I noted here recently that there are some contests that people should be entering. Well, the contests just keep coming. Starlog has a handful right now, opportunities to win DVD box sets from Fringe, The Big Bang Theory, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And Starlog has teamed with its sister title, Fangoria, to give away a costume from the movie Pandorum. Fango's also giving away a trip to its new horror extravaganza in Las Vegas. Don't miss these chances!
• Why did it take me so long to discover DC's Wednesday Comics? This innovative, newspaper-format 12-issue special series was two-thirds finished before I stumbled across it, only because I saw it on the Mr. Magazine blog. So I've bought the final four issues as they've come out, but I don't want to read them until I get the first issues (thanks, Mile High Comics). But they look great -- printed on high-quality newsprint (i.e., not cheap newsprint) in full color, with big panels for the art. I hope this series has sold well, for two reasons: I'd like to see DC make this an ongoing weekly publication, and because I hope it will keep DC and Marvel and Dark Horse and all of the others innovating. If DC can revive newsprint for comics, what else can be done? A lot, I'll bet.

My previous media roundup.

The Disappearing Gay Magazine Market

To be more specific, today's blog post is about the disappearing gay adult magazine market, though even some non-adult gay magazines are having a tough time of it (for example, The Advocate). From Matthew Rettenmund comes word that Men and Freshmen will cease publication (or will go to newsstand-only distribution as quarterly themed magazines [warning: that last link includes some NSFW images], which, as Rettenmund correctly points out, is pretty much death for a magazine anyway. Advertisers don't consider quarterly magazines to be magazines, and readers tend to forget about a magazine three months after the last issue.

Rettenmund, for you uninitiated, is a popular novelist and magazine editor. Before his current gig, he had served as an editor at Mavety magazines, which published a string of gay periodicals that were all abruptly shuttered earlier this year.

The same thing is true about Men and Freshmen that was true when I wrote it about the Mavety magazines. These magazines had nothing more to them than porn. For years, gay skin magazines have launched with the promise to be the "gay Playboy," but they never delivered. If they had non-sex-related material in them (travel articles or interviews), those very soon disappeared so they could devote more pages to what they assumed their readers were buying the magazine to get: erotic stories and nude photos. I've got nothing against either, but I do note that Playboy is still around -- bowed and challenged, yes, but still publishing with millions of readers -- while competitor Penthouse threw away its millions of readers when publisher Guccione ramped up the sex content in a last-ditch (futile) effort to save his publishing empire. The nudity and sexual content can be gotten easily and endlessly online, so at best it is an added spice to a print publication. The print publication needs to offer something that is much rarer online, which in my humble (and constantly repeated) opinion should be longform journalism, good writing, and good reader service. Playboy still does that. Winq more or less does that. Men and Freshmen don't/didn't.

One last note: For a great fictional look behind the scenes at a New York-based gay magazine, read Rettenmund's 1998 novel Blind Items, which features the editor of just such a magazine trying to juggle his job, a new love, and celebrity closets.

UPDATE 1/20/11: This report has been updated and expanded in my new digital magazine, Magma. Read it free online.

UPDATE 3/25/11: Mate and Winq magazines team up.

Resurrected Magazines

Jason Fell blogs over at Folio: about magazines that died, only to be brought back to life. No, this resurrection story is not an update on my post yesterday about Christian magazines. It's about some mostly small magazines that scrounged up new financing and relaunched their print editions.

Longtime reader(s) of this blog know my favored candidate for resurrection, and my not-favored candidates. But none of that really matters. I'm sure we'll just see another %$@* revival of Radar: The Magazine the Marketplace Could not Kill.

Updates: Mavety, Playboy, Condé Nast

The Chicago Tribune follows up its report on upcoming major changes at Playboy magazine with some comments from PEI interim CEO/Chairman Jerome Kern: "I envision having a magazine. ... I don’t want a magazine that’s ... in intensive care. I want a magazine that stands for the brand [and] is out with the public, but isn't going to eat us alive. That's what we're trying to figure out." So that could be good; that could mean they're looking for a path to producing a quality magazine without busting the budget. My broken-record advice is to focus on great articles; the photos aren't going to sell long-time readers.

By the time you read this, PEI might have already appointed a permanent CEO. I'm figuring it'll be someone hispanic and female. Oh, wait, that's the Supreme Court justice...

And, just for the hell of it, former Partridge Family star Shirley Jones is being touted (by her husband) as a Playboy model. I don't makes them up; I just reports them.

The news that publisher Mavety Media Group is putting to sleep its entire line of gay skin mags has rocketed around the blogosphere. Tim1965 provides a rundown of the state of the genre publishing field.

Meanwhile, Back2Stonewall.com offers an elegy for Mavety's titles.

Made in Brazil thinks Conde Nast's Men's Vogue is a waste.

Big Dumb Object -- which I think is just a damn great title for a blog or a band -- has some thoughts on Wired mag, and a reader even mentions one of my favorite oldies: Future Life magazine.

More later. Good night.

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.