There’s a saying about a frog in a cooking pot; throw him into boiling water and he jumps right out, but if you put him in cold water and heat it up slowly, he’ll hardly notice as he’s dissolving into amphibian soup.
That’s about how my fellow journalism majors and I reacted over the last few years as the printed news industry slow-motion collapsed around us, and the functions we were learning to perform evaporated. We hardly paid attention to reports that newspaper revenues were down and hiring was slow, that newspapers were outsourcing more and more of their news gathering operations to the Associated Press and worrying more and more about catchy graphic design. We weren’t even anxious, until we got out into the world as fledgling reporters and suddenly discovered we were irrelevant.
I was still working on my journalism degree when I started writing for Nightcharm, fresh out of my internship with a local paper. I’ve graduated now, and in the 18 months since, several regional papers have gone out of business — some of them that were over a hundred years old – and even nationally renowned papers like the Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times have taken drastic hits in circulation. Many papers lose money or barely break even, staying alive because their investors are more sentimental than concerned with profit.
I was, in a sense, dealing with the devil by writing for Nightcharm. The Internet is the reason why printed news is going under; hard copies can’t compete with the convenience of your home computer. The Internet has no printing costs, and its easier to wade through drops in readership when your overhead is small. Everything in today’s printed paper happened yesterday and has already been covered Online. Meanwhile, classified ads, a major source of income for local and regional papers, dried up as people realized it was easier to post on Craigslist. Readers canceled their subscriptions when they could get their daily briefing from websites: why pay for something you can get it Online for free?
The general thinking was that publications catering to niche markets would survive the downfall of mainstream press, so we had hope. But for LGBT media, the shit has officially hit the fan.
This month, both the the Washington Blade and the Southern Voice unexpectedly shut down operations when the parent company collapsed. The Advocate announced it will become an insert in Out magazine for a few months and end when current subscriptions expire.
Welcome to the new gay media, folks: blogs.
In one sense, the new media landscape is more democratic. There are fewer barriers to access; anyone who can use a keypad can try blogging for free on major host sites and doesn’t need to start out with seed capital. Blogs allow readers to comment and easily give the writers some feedback. Blogs are more plentiful to choose from, and thus more specialized to a reader’s particular interest; few mainstream media outlets offer cultural commentary and humor articles alongside (and funded by) hardcore porn, for example.
But I think most people who live in free societies have a basic understanding that credible journalism is important. I’m not sure if a blogger would have had the clout to take down the Nixon administration the way those two Washington Post reporters did.
The shut-down announcement released by The Advocate‘s parent company included the following: “As an alternative, we suggest a subscription to our other monthly title, Out magazine. If you liked The Advocate, we’re sure you’ll enjoy Out.”
I call shenanigans on that one. I have nothing against Out, but to say that “Fashion, Style, Celebrity, Opinion for the Modern Gay man” (which is the Out website’s banner) can capture the function and credibility of The Advocate is like calling Fox News “Fair and Balanced.”
“LGBT” news in The Advocate has been reduced to gay men only in Out, axing women and transgendered people. Also importantly, the emphasis on political news and analysis is replaced by an emphasis on pop culture. The first article on the Advocate site as of this writing is a story on Foreign Aid for HIV/AIDS supporting homophobic governments. On Out? An Adam Lambert interview is the lead story, but I couldn’t help but ruminate on the Five Best Suitcases feature also propped up on the front page.
At my tender age I’m not one to behave curmudgeonly when it comes to change. While I’m losing maybe-wouldof-kindof-interested job opportunities as print news crumbles, an older generation is losing the very first gay paraphernalia they got their hands on when they were in the closet. They’re losing media that they’ve trusted since the movement began. (My first contact was with a blogger who lived in Texas and was about six years older than I was.)
Meanwhile, new media are emerging. Bloggers have a rare opportunity to buff up their operations and achieve some class. My favorite news source has long been Slate Magazine Online, and we know you all love coming to Nightcharm. This is a moment of poignant opportunity, if you want to get your hands dirty and make your case.
© 2009, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
The successor to the Washington Blade ( a fiscal and comunity success til the corporation killed it) has risen as a phoenix in the DC Agenda. A new skin on the previous staff. They have produced and distributed the first edition, with plans to go to full-size next edition and with ad revenue in place. What got killed here was an over-leveraged corporate nothing. THE PURPOSE IS ALIVE AND WELL!!! It is LIVE – (link) Check out the new website. As it says do not judge them too harshly! It is truly a labor of love! Many of former Blade staff have labored long hours to make this happen!
The same phenomena is happening in every social setting. Go to the bars and you’ll find that a lot of them are empty tombs on most nights. It’s particularly affected the leather scene, as several cities no longer have bars devoted to specialized clientele. Everyone is at home banging away on their computer and waving their dick in front of a netcam. Part is due to the economy, it’s expensive to spend big $$$ on beer or risk a DUI, and part is laziness, it’s easy to sit naked in front of your computer. Personally I miss the real human interaction of going to the bars.
Wow, GG, if nothing else, it seems as if the roads are now safer for the rest of us sober drivers. Sorry you’ve had to sacrifice your club-scene fun at our expense.
lol. Yanking the Advocate and suggesting its readers suscribe to Out is like cancelling National Geographic and saying “but we highly recommend the Sears catalog.”
You can tell it all from the advertisements, which are by far more sexual and glossy in Out. But hey, it’s still leaps and bounds better than Genre. I’m not against seeing some skin (obviously if I visit Nightcharm) but something about using sex to advertise virtually every product is annoying, especially since the guys ALL LOOK THE SAME.
Anyway. I’m sad for gay media. Where will all the smart, serious guys go?
Kyle, one of the things internet can do for you is provide you with something like that. You just need to find it. Or create it. There’s probably plenty of other people that need to fill the space that is left.
The downside is, you’ll need people who are willing to put in the effort. You could maybe never get the quality of professional journalism, but there’s plenty of people out there who *know* things, who have proper opinions and are able to voice them in an eloquent manner.
Who knows. It just might happen.
So what we’d get, John, is professional-level commentary.
“Journalism” isn’t incredibly difficult or esoteric, and most people with decent writing skills are capable of doing it. But almost no blogger ever does.
Journalism is, in essence, finding the news yourself. Bloggers comment on someone else’s news. How do you find news? Start with a press release, call the people who wrote it and ask a few questions, call somebody who has a different perspective and ask a few questions, call somebody else from a different perspective and ask a few questions, write them in an article.
If the issue is still news later on, follow up with an update. If you find out that information someone gave you was incorrect, run an update on that as well.
Bloggers just don’t do stuff. And they don’t have anyone there watching them to make sure they don’t pull things out of their asses. It would be interesting to see if somebody steps up and fills that role, but it’s tough to imagine any blog becoming truly trustworthy without editorial supervision. No one person’s judgment is superior to an editorial process.
It’s not the case so much for smaller print outlets which have died off just based on the law of the jungle, but I can tell you the larger ones are in many ways getting what they deserve. Like other sectors that have recently taken a nosedive, Print became greedy, lazy, and complacent. It used young people on the revolving intern rack and hired the ones who were wealthy enough to be able to work for free, not necessarily the best-qualified ones; it in essence has become a career track for the well-off and -connected who are born in the inside lane.
The Literary field wasn’t interested in obscure writers and their unsolicited manuscripts they could foster. It wanted hack wonder-kids, ghostwritten tripe, and generic “niche” books. You basically have to have an agent now to even get your manuscript past the recycle bin. In turn, universities churned kids out of the diploma factories knowing and not caring that they were dead in the water.
A personal anecdote: two years ago I dropped off a resume after a murderous day of pavement-pounding at a certain name publication (I’ll call it “Chronology”). The very hot security guard was amiable in calling a member of the staff down the lobby to pick it up (urchins are no longer allowed in the offices proper).
I expected someone at the top of their game to appear; what I got was a fat, winded, inarticulate, and seriously-over-the-hill schlub who gave the guard guff because he was torn away from his lunch and office chair for a whole three minutes. As he waddled away, the guard rolled his eyes and said to me, “Yup, kiddo — that’s worked here for years. Don’t expect a call.”
if someone steals your writing off your blog and posts it as their own, should you write about it on your blog thereby linking to their site. Was just a funny situation I saw the other day. What do you do? The guy whose blog I saw it on mentioned it then gave a phrase to google to find the culprit if one was interested, but the accused copier’s site was quite a few results above the original.
It’s a harsh new world – again.
Playgirl magazine disappeared at the beginning of this year, that could have served as a sign of bad omen.
In response to Kyle’s question the “Harvard Gay And Lesbian Review” is a very respectable publication(and not going anywhere
TugboatAL, the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review has a circulation of 12,000. It’s tag line, “the Journal of Record for GLBT issues” reeks of elitism and privilege.
NOT what I think the gay rights movement was about; I don’t see the people fighting in the Stonewall Riots picking up “the Journal of Record” from a Harvard press.
You have trashy pop cultural stuff like Genre and Out, then you have fancy hyper-elite stuff like the HGLR. One is too broad and fluffy to be meaningful, the other is too elite and esoteric to be useful. I think what was good about The Advocate is that in its “mainstream” journalistic style, it appealed to the broadest swath of people, the middle 60 percent of the community. I think that those at the top and those at the bottom are fairly robust and stable, but if the middle drops out that’s a huge problem.
My advise to the Advocate? Beef up your online presence. There’s nothing to be done about dropping circulation, especially since the reason why circulation is dropping is because of the Internet. I understand that less money will be made from an Internet-specific publication, but that’s to be expected. Until someone can come up with a successful business model for Internet publication, it’s gonna be a rough road for everyone. Until then, the best course of action is to continue to beef up the publication’s presence online. And when someone finally does create this successful business model, well, they’ll be better prepared to jump on the wagon. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the folks at the Advocate that pioneer Internet publication.
“if someone steals your writing off your blog and posts it as their own, should you write about it on your blog thereby linking to their site. Was just a funny situation I saw the other day. What do you do? The guy whose blog I saw it on mentioned it then gave a phrase to google to find the culprit if one was interested, but the accused copier’s site was quite a few results above the original.”
My advice is to make sure you have a clear copyright notice on your blog. Then make sure that everything is dated. If somebody steals your content, send a clear “cease and desist” message stating clearly that the information was copyrighted and that you had it published on a previous date.
You can also always try bluffing and say that you send your stuff to the copyright office so you have clear proof that you wrote the material and published it first. That might be more believable if your blog has a professional moneymaking element.
I’m sure stuff gets stolen often and the writer often never finds out about it. But my hunch is that original authors and publishers come from more credible institutions than whoever is yanking copyrighted material, and you would clearly win a debate.
Of course, as a writer myself, I’d say that I don’t mind (and actually love) other people re-posting my stuff to give it extra play as long as they link back and don’t try to pass it off as their own. In some cases it can be free advertisement, depending on how its done.
I heard the Advocate might continue as an insert in Out indefinitely! Rather than being eliminated! This is good news!
Does anyone stop to think that maybe The Advocate is just a sucky magazine? I haven’t read it in years, and every time I pick it up there is nothing in it that I’m interested in. I already know what the commentators are going to say and the pop culture and fashion stuff bores me. I’m thirty-eight and live in the suburbs, which I know automatically makes me a square in the eyes of most gay publications, but what they (the publishers) never seem to take into consideration is their readers! We don’t ALL live in Chelsea or WeHo.
Alex, is the fact that the Advocate is something “haven’t read in years” possibly, just possibly an indication that you don’t even know what’s you’re talking about?
I mean, imagine this. I overhear a conversation you’re having with your friends about trouble in some business I don’t know about, say, power tools, and I say “Does anyone stop to think the reason Dewalt is going under is that it just SUCKS? I mean, I don’t have any interest in power tools. Who builds things these days!?”
Especially since you think it’s all about Chelsea or WeHo, when the Advocate is a national newspaper focusing on POLITICS which take place in pretty much every corner of the country. Not commentary. Politics. News.
I don’t really care if somebody dislikes a news publication for whatever reason, but there’s something irksome about the “I don’t know anything about it but I still think it sucks” meme.
Homosexuality is the opposite of diversity. ‘Gay marriage’ is called same-sex. Same (i.e. homo) is the opposite of diverse. In fact, homosexuality is diversity-intolerant, by definition. The opposite sex is always rejected by a homosexual person, without regard to the individual merit of that person, just because they are of a different gender.Since there is zero gender diversity in any same-sex union, same-sex unions also contain zero gender equality. As a result, genders are sex-segregated into male and female dominated institutions.
“Sexy ass,” I hope when you post stuff like “…homosexuality is diversity-intolerant, by definition. The opposite sex is always rejected by a homosexual person, without regard to the individual merit of that person, just because they are of a different gender…”
…you understand the blatant obviousness that I can replace “homosexuality” with “heterosexuality” and “opposite sex” with “same-sex” and have the exact same statement. Straight people automatically reject everyone of the same sex.
I guess what you’re trying to say is, only a bisexual person who is willing to have an unlimited of sexual partners is truly “diverse.”
Thank you, Anonymous.
Sexy ass’s email actually came in as spam; it had a link to a straight porn site embedded in the text. We took out the link but published the comment because it was unusually impassioned, certainly provocative. It was also wrong — for the reasons Anonymous just pointed out.
Gay people, we would argue, are more likely to have heterosexual sex at some point in their lives, usually in their early youth. Why? Because we live in a relentlessly heterosexual culture. The boy-girl message is everywhere. Given this pressure, it is likely that a gay man or woman might try to assimilate by having this highly advertised experience. Committed heterosexuals are under no such pressure.
Also, “bicurious” is a two-way street. Some gay men and woman also are curious about sex with “the other team.” In that case, the gay person would be bisexual but with a strong preference for their own sex.
Diversity, for all that, is not a matter of who you sleep with, but who you can accept as a fellow human being, no better or worse than you.
Oooh Ooooh! Can I play word games too?!
Gravity is the opposite of science. “Laws of Physics†is called a law, which is the opposite of Science, since science is based on theories. In fact, Gravity is non-science by definition. Gravity is never disputed in the scientific community, and with no debate which includes dispute, it cannot be defined as true science. Since there is zero debate pertaining to Gravity, then Gravity also contains zero science.
Seanshawn, there was not one word of substance that defended The Advocate in your not-so-articulate rant. (what’s you’re talking about).
Seanshawn, there was not one word of substance that defended The Advocate in your not-so-articulate rant. (what’s you’re talking about).
Nor was there any word of substance that actually critiqued the Advocate in the original post that I was responding to, which was my original post. Thanks for pointing out you grasp the concept of IREELEVANT COMMENTARY.
*which was my original post = which was my original point
(and I meant to put quotes around the sentence I was quoting)
Hey, update, guys: didn’t a few of the gay newspapers you mentioned eventually come back in some form, even already?