'The Advocate' and 'Out' Combine Subscriptions

On Thursday, Paul Colichman, CEO of Here Media, which owns a host of gay and lesbian properties including Gay.com and the on-demand cable channel Here!, announced that the company would be packaging The Advocate and Out into a single subscription to reduce the costs associated with printing and distributing the two magazines. While Colichman's letter to readers was somewhat ambiguous, it's been widely interpreted to mean than the 41-year-old Advocate will no longer be sold on newsstands.

The announcement came a week after Queerty, a gay and lesbian news and media blog, reported layoffs at the company and referred to it as "a sinking ship." (Here Media, of course, is hardly the only media company eliminating employees: For starters, see Time, Inc., the New York Times, and Condé Nast, which shares a parent company, Advance Publications, with American City Business Journals, publisher of this website.)

At least one former staffer wonders how the two publications can mesh since The Advocate is a news magazine that covers politics, business, and health topics, while Out is a lifestyle publication that focuses on fashion, entertainment, and travel. In a blistering post on the Huffington Post, Judy Wieder, former editor in chief of The Advocate, asked, "What the hell happened?"

After listing many of the magazine's great journalistic moments, Wieder expressed her concern about the magazine's current approach, which she sums up as, "short videos and skim-the-surface articles."

Writes Wieder: "Younger people may not embrace in-your-face activism as much as older generations had to—although the thousands and thousands of young faces in the streets last year protesting Proposition 8 certainly suggest a far more dynamic generation than most surveys indicate. No, I refuse to believe it's all about hookups, videos, sound bites, and downloading for them."

It's worth noting that Colichman's letter cited the closure the original print incarnation of Portfolio.com, as well as Gourmet and Genre as examples of "the weaknesses of the print publication model." Funny, then, that Here Media isn't choosing just to go entirely digital with The Advocate.

As he explains, keeping The Advocate in print—even in a diminished form—is something of a point of pride (if you'll excuse the pun): "We believe we must distribute content via print, online, and television in order to sustain a viable news service—one that can afford to provide professionally written, edited, and produced stories and news packages. Our organization maintains the highest level of journalistic integrity. Here Media employees, of which there are more than 150, all believe that you deserve honesty and professionalism."

Great. But they can do all that online too. And they don't even have to resort to "short videos and skim-the-surface articles" to do it.

(One side note: the editor of Portfolio.com, J. Jennings Moss, spent 18 months as The Advocate's Washington correspondent from 1995 to 1997.)