Playboy considers 'radical changes' to flagship magazine

Source: Chicago Tribune

Reeling from declines in readership and advertising, Playboy magazine is contemplating "radical changes" that may include cutting its circulation and reducing the frequency with which it is published, Jerome Kern, interim chairman and chief executive of Playboy Enterprises Inc. told analysts Monday.

The troubled publisher has embarked on a series of cost cuts in recent months, including closing its New York offices on May 1. Christie Hefner departed as CEO in January, after two decades as leader of the Chicago-based media firm, and Playboy's board is in the process of finding her replacement.

Next up is a make-over of its flagship publication. Playboy plans to combine its July and August issues into a single edition to reduce printing and distribution costs, and it is looking at trimming its circulation and reducing its advertising rates, officials said.

Playboy is also planning to roll out a redesign in its June edition aimed at bringing a "younger and fresher look to the magazine," Kern said.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-biz-playboy-magazine-pla,0,1213400.story

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Wow. Print is really dead.

People have choices, so people who want to spank it to something else can. Hooray for the internet.

still I find this kind of sad for some reason. Life is really changing as far a print and photography etc.

much more fun that way.

:evilgrin:

Just like TV news and print newspapers. Find a new business model or close it up.

but as a porn mag its sort of a bygone era, and passe'. it is kind of a dinosaur now. the repressed 50s fed the image of some grey suited working man's dreams of sitting around in a smoking jacket sipping brandy whilst his dog and pointy titted females sat at his feet. now thats just laughable to people. wonder how Esquire is doing?

Playboy underwent a lobotomy about ten years ago in a pathetic attempt to compete with more popular "lad mags" like Maxim. Now the only thing that distinguishes it from its competitors is the increasingly quaint airbrushed photos of surgically-enhanced women. It really is a dinosaur now, as you say.

well then they should fold if they arent cutting edge news and articles. yeah, I havent read it since the 70s. oh well.

Growing up as a teen, I was a longtime reader of GQ and Esquire, which my dad subscribed...When I saw how badly they had to dumb it down to compete with Maxim's instant popularity (and how many of my friends saw Maxim as a true men's magazine) my heart was broken...

hugh represented that magazine and i wonder how much damage his dumb program has done to his own image.

A really old one, nowadays...

playboy and it`s oui magazine had the latest authors ,writers, and interviews. social commentary,muckracking,political reporting. i have almost the entire 6-7 years of oui magazine. it was playboy`s "maxim" or "stuff" magazine which had great articles about just about everything....and really hot woman from around the world.

now playboy is a hollow shell and oui was sold off years ago...bring back real content and they may save the magazine

Either playboy goes more mainstream or they go away

I've worked for the largest magazine printer in the world for the last 11 years, and I've never seen things as bad as they are now. Magazines are dying left and right, page counts are dropping like a stone, and advertisers are starting to dwindle. My plant recently laid off about a quarter of its workforce. If even a giant like Playboy is falling on hard times, it would appear I should start filling out applications.

Someday it will roar back with a vengeance.





Okay, I'm being completely optimistic here.

its (now so boring) fifties format. Back then it was edgy and now it needs to be edgy again. I would say change is in order. To begin with, stop the entertainment for men shit. It should be entertainment for all now, hetero and homo male and female. Now that would be edgy and could be done with class and the usual intelligence that Playboy always had. They are also going to have to change the name to remove the boy part. I'm sure some one will think of something that will work.

Alas, I'm afraid they are going to be secretly purchased by someone like Donald Trump to publish "unauthorized" nude photos of beauty pagent winners.

Miss California as you have never seen her before!

If that's not what they are already...

Playboy is dead. Long live Playbi.

...in The People vs. Larry Flynt when he said, "Gentleman... Playboy is mocking you."

How ANYONE can get their rocks off with Playboy amazes me.

The T&A in anime is more honest and believable.

I subscribed a few months ago and have been disappointed. I thought Playboy would have harder hitting political articles. It's all about the latest techno gadgets and high end consumer crap.

I won't be renewing unless there's drastic improvement.

.... Hugh Hefner changed a lot of things and his magazine paid good money to quality short story writers for years and years.

Watch Hefner now in his Captian's hat and that crap on cable makes me sad.

They all have that 1980s heavy metal hair band groupie vibe to them. There's been scant ethnic diversity.

the busty, airbrushed blonde thing has been cliche for a couple decades now...there are too many free online sources now with more than enough "real" looking beautiful women

"Younger and fresher," is exactly what has gotten them to where they are.

Playboy was a great magazine, from the fifties through the eighties. They offered intelligent articles on important issues, exclusive interviews with world-class leaders and intellects, and sexy photographs of some of the most beautiful women in the world.

Today's version of the magazine is vastly different. It's like Maxim with fake boobies.

They used to feature interviews, thousands and thousands of words long, with important figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and Malcolm X. Nowadays, the Interview feature has been reduced to babbling nonsense from the likes of "The Rock" and Tom Green. (I had to google Drew Barrymore to remember Mr. Green's first name.)

I'm still a subscriber (because they have offered me very attractive rates), but I can't think of the last article in the rag that I found interesting. It's always very trivial stuff.

And the "playmates" aren't what they used to be either. I'm just not titillated by the Stepford Models they've been peddling. Go back and look at the models they featured in the eighties. Now, those were some sexy women. Not the prefabricated models of today.

I think they should bring back the great fiction by great authors, the great reports by great journalists, the great interviews of great (and infamous) public figures, and the beautiful models with great natural bodies. Unfortunately, it seems they are headed in the opposite direction. And that, as sure as hell, will be the final nail in the coffin of the Playboy empire.

Oh boy.

The women of reality show x. Some random woman from some semi-high profile scandal. A forgotten singer from 20 years ago who just got a boob job.

Yawn.

And the "girl next door" hasn't been seen in decades.

Ah, the 1970s and the stack of Playboys in my dad's office.

Yeah, dad. I knew where they were.

I first started looking at the magazine more than 45 years ago (old now, precocious then), now I just glance if there is an unwrapped copy at the newsstand, shake my head, put it back and walk away (And not just because the Playmate is now young-enough to be my kid).

The one thing all of the Playmates and other women had in common back in the Sixties and Seventies was you could see a light behind their eyes.

Now all of the women get the same makeup, grooming, silicone and tramp stamps.

I liked the "Girl Next Door" look; I don't like the Girl just back from the Plastic Surgeon look.

something like this

take out the pimples, acne scars, zits, bruises, mottling, hair, lumps, moles , and other stuff. and wrinkles. all the stuff that makes people look human.

I knew a commercial artist in Chicago who did photo retouching for Playboy back in the 60s when Hef was still based in the Windy City.

I lived in Chitown when Playboy had its headquarters there. used to hang out with the guys who wrote the Playboy forums and their wives. smoked pot with them. I was a bad girl.

:hide:

Some pals of mine and I put together a free street rag as a hobby, and here are the things I've noticed in the past two years:

1) The lead time for a print magazine sucks. You write a magazine article in September. The rest of the editors get around to looking at it in October. The layout guy breaks up with his girlfriend in November. By January the article is stale and has to be re-written, but you don't want to tell the layout guy because he's finally getting something done. Somewhere around March or April your article shows up, late and rendered irrelevant by world events, a hundred news articles and an advancing story. Now, I'm an amateur, working with amateurs, but when I look in the back of most magazines, they tell me in May's edition, dated June, what's going to be in the July edition, so they deal with similar lead times.

2) The editorial process sucks. There is something about the collaborative process, even when everyone is doing it purely for amusement, that prompts people to offer input even when it's not necessary. Now, there may be an H. L. Mencken wandering around the editorial offices of every other magazine on earth, but we sure as hell don't have one. The result, which we constantly have to police and fight, is watered-down same-sounding articles that lack teeth. On our website, on the other hand, people just put their shit up there when it's ready, in their own voices and with all the rough edges that come with that.

3) Citation sucks. On the Internet, when I want to cite something, I can include a hyperlink to the exact article I used as my source. It takes no space. There's no room for citations in a magazine, and if you spend your time cleverly folding your sources into your article, it jumps in size and your fleet of readers contracts because some of your slowest ships can't follow a five-line paragraph.

4) Distribution sucks. Even when the cover price is right--free, in my case--it's costly and difficult to deliver the magazines to far-away distribution points, and by far I mean farther than one can throw a twenty-pound stack of shitty paper magazines. You either do it yourself, or try to find someone reliable to deliver it, who won't go and try to sell that stack on eBay. Far-reaching markets are invariably ignored or underserviced. Distribution by mail is expensive, complicated, and simply something we don't want to mess with.

Honestly, I think the world is just moving too fast for print magazines. I have high hopes that someday soon everyone will own a simple, folding screen that can approximate the look and feel of a magazine or a newspaper, that can load articles at will from wi-fi distribution points. But that's a lot farther off than my magazine can survive. But we knew that when we named it.

Local fish wrap that the stories were three days behind the Internet, I don't need to pay for something I already read.

...your fleet of readers contracts because some of your slowest ships can't follow a five-line paragraph.

I write user manuals.

Though I hate it, experience has shown me that a meaty paragraph is a turn-off to many casual readers.

Somewhere along the way I got the bright idea to start busting my paragraphs up so that they are no longer a string of sentences addressing a single larger thought.

Instead, they are now individual paragraphs, isolated by a nice pretty island of blank space.

I'm also told that any word longer than two syllables is also a no-no, if you want to get in good with the bathroom reading crowd.

And don't get me started on the "AutoSummarize" people, who won't read dense text until it's run through MS Word's little salad-shooter for thoughts.

And even then I find a lot of people simply cannot understand what is written and will take the exact opposite of your meaning.

There's a guy called Don Lancaster who has been writing tech articles for three or four decades, I first read him in some of the amateur electronics magazines about thirty years ago. He claims that how a piece *looks* on the page is more important than what is actually said in terms of keeping readers hooked.

At first I thought he was nuts, now I tend to agree.

I'm just about to finish Neal Stephens "Cryptonomicon" and I have to say that it's a major adjustment to go back to reading weighty paragraphs, some of his sentences are longer than most paragraphs I read online. I was probably half way through a thousand page or so book before my reading skills came back up to speed. (I haven't read much that wasn't online in quite some time).

No -- "print" has just moved to the internet ---

Anchors and "film at eleven" is dead --

Can we ever forget the benefits of Playboy for women . . .

Covers of women with their legs spread apart -- and a view of their cervix --

Hustler's photo of a woman being fed into a meat grinder --

Exploitation of women thrives on the internet --

those who have relationships with photographs -- those who need domination to climax --

they all know where to go now!

...after the Nancy Sinatra pictorial burned both of my eyes out.

Men & boys can see just naked women online, anytime they want..or they can rent a movie..

When Playboy started out, times were different..It's like the 8-track tape or the transistor radio.. great and edgy when it came out..but its time is way past...

What is next? Hell if I know. Nobody does.

Remember - in business as in all things in life - nobody can predict the future. By definition it is unknowable. So if someone tells you they know, realize they don't know about the subject.

For example, the auto business.