Karen, the CEO, would occasionally come out of her office to actually talk to the employees. (But only because the VP of our section asked her to.) At that time we owned LPI media (The Advocate, Out, etc..) and we were watching it’s market share slide. In our meeting Karen described the state of the print side of the company with lots of “it’s tough times” and “it’s a challenging market to be in.” Blah blah blah. And then came the question and answer period…

Considering that g@y.com was giving away free Advocate subscriptions to it’s hundreds of thousand of paid subscribers how is it possible our circulation is decreasing? Meanwhile, Karen talks of a publishing industry in decline… yet The Economist had increased their circulation by 100% over the previous four years. (And in this current year of 2009 by another 14% year over year.) So, what is the difference between The Advocate and The Economist? Quality. That is the difference.

I pointed out to Karen that anybody can get low quality skim worthy news every single day, updated constantly, on the internet. That if wanted to increase our circulation that improving the VALUE of our content to our readers would be the way to do it. All of America’s low quality journalism magazines have seen declines in circulation. And never once has it occurred to any of them that the problem is that they are NOT indispensable. That they have managed to get along for far too long on being “the only game in town.”

Well guess what folks? They are not the only game in town now, they are one of thousands of games in town and their game is looking stale.

Want to increase readership of the Advocate? Pay for articles written by people who are authoritative on subjects that are important to the modern gay person. And don’t write surface articles on those subjects, write in depth articles that’ll INFORM the reader in a way they couldn’t get online.

As this QUEERTY article points out: it takes MONEY. Not just to publish the physical media but to create QUALITY content. I wouldn’t care if the advocate showed up in my mail box having been photocopied at Kinkos, I’d read it if the articles inside were worth reading.

Let me put it in a way that the people who run the advocate can understand: the market for stupid people is SATURATED. You don’t even provide high quality stupidity for these stupid people. SO STOP TRYING TO BEAT PEREZ HILTON. Instead there is a market out there for people seeking HIGH QUALITY information. Expensive to produce HIGH QUALITY information.

If you can’t even contemplate attempting that please, sell the Advocate to somebody who can and who has the money to do it. Otherwise you’ll just continue to run the magazine into the ground. And it’ll take your company with it just like it took PlanetOut down.

Where? Can you name them? While I admit, the Advocate long ago began that downward slump toward being another bubblegum-smacking pop rag devoid of any intelligence, it was also – as some have pointed out – the Newsweek or Time of its genre. Now everything is online and insipid: gossip, pop culture, celebrity worship, eye candy, fashion, and poor journalism. And while you might think today’s kids are growing up and coming out in an ever-inclusive world that is, as the phrase goes, “post gay”, the sad truth is that many young gay men and women are ignorant of how things once were and just how thin the ice is beneath those stylish shoes.

Before I begin, I need to say that an earlier VERY rough draft of this piece accidentally got posted. That never should have happened and I apologize to anyone who saw it.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....42725.html

Much of it rings true, albeit from a specific, biased point of view. But I like the fact that there is a point of view to it, instead of the usual edgeless rounded corner banality that a lot of coverage has become.

Some thoughts: Colichman is clearly a genial, ‘super-smart in the ways he’s smart and aware of the ways he’s not smart’ type of guy. He’s made his money over the years and isn’t going to let anyone or anything flatten the spring in his step. But he delegates judgement in situations by co-mingling the passionate parties and staying out of the dirty business of making the call. He’s like a gay Canadian liberal Ronald Reagan in this respect. And we all know what happened with Ed Meese & Co. under that regime.

In many respects, the fate of Advocate was cast back in the 90′s, and under Weider’s watch. The magazine business is full of notoriously thin-skinned, cerebral people for whom the sheer wackness of the web was a frightening, muffled monster, best kept behind bars and fed by a few brave souls, but never to be set free, for fear it would eat whole the fragile infrastructure of decades of journalistic and publishing habit.

Every interval that might have otherwise provided for an opportunity for reflection, and maybe even the much needed ‘revolution’ in a hide bound magazine culture was interrupted by a corporate take over and a cultural upheaval that took precedence over the urgent need to go internet. And each time the dust settled it was time for the next upheaval.

What one senses in Weider’s writing is how close she came to ‘getting” how to parlay a magazine off of its evil web twin, how to make news and break the news you’re making. How to get everyone to come to your party, each for their own reason.

The answer is out there, as the saying goes, but there is probably not enough fuel left in this particular craft to get to that answer and return home in one piece.

Stone, meet glass house.