Patricia Nell
Warren, is allowing IGW to reprint her article:FALLING DOMINOS:
THE THREATS TO LGBT BOOK PUBLISHING
A series by Patricia Nell Warren
Part Five:
Pros and Cons of Pink Corporatization
Originally published in January ’06 Outlands Magazine
Inevitably, pink America got enough pink capital together to bring merger-mania crashing into the LGBT media world. In the last few years, many of our own media corporations have morphed into gay-owned micro-versions of Time Warner.
The impact on our LGBT book world has already been obvious to many book people. These mergers are setting up some long new rows of dominos, that could have devastating effects on the future of our genre if they fall.
Managing the News
The most obvious impact is a broadened concentration of corporate control over content in our own media – what used to be wryly termed “news management” in the mainstream.
Some of the leverage for “news management” comes from the corporate owners themselves, meaning the owners’ political biases; some can come from government pressure. The rest comes from big advertisers. As a young junior editor working at a big mainstream magazine in the 1960s, I first became aware of this ugly reality in the media world—when our staff had to watch as big utility advertisers leveraged our company’s ownership to stop doing exposes on the dangers of nuclear power plants and start hyping nuclear power as “safe and clean.”
There will also be broadened corporate control over who gets advertising access to this broadened LGBT marketplace.
As with the Americans who ask queasy questions about the super-controls in those super-empires, there are gay people with their own queasy questions about media control in the LGBT world. The risks are many—from the potential loss of diversity in content and opinion, to the possibility of censorship and political reprisal and conflicts of interest.
“A Whole New Gay World”
In November 2005, after five years of trying, the popular dot.com PlanetOut, Inc. finally succeeded in buying privately owned LPI Media Inc. and its stable of print media for $31.1 million. Result: the world’s largest gay-owned media entity. PlanetOut CEO Lowell Selvin announced glowingly that this buyout would give other LGBT media "the opportunity to grow their products. This will move us out of the gay ghetto and into a whole new gay world."
But not everybody was cheering. Commentator Eleanor Brown had this to say in PressPassQ: “PlanetOut may have to deal with some criticism that the conglomerate is too big and will control too many media voices, cutting down on diversity.”
Another caution came from prominent gay publicist Bob Witeck, who said, “Bigger is not always better,” and added, “A larger company has greater responsibility and their values have to reflect that. It also has to have a sense of humility.”
The merger had been almost a decade in taking shape. In 2000 LPI, who already owned The Advocate, did a buyout of its rival Out and several other magazines, and diversified by adding the formerly independent publisher Alyson Books.
For its part, PlanetOut had started up as a privately owned website in 1996 and found immediate success with LGBT people who were hungry for online community with an e-commerce twist. As PNO grew, it picked up other websites—AOL’s OnQ, Gay Financial Network, Out and About Travel—and merged with the highly successful Gay.com. In 2004 it finally floated its first public stock offering on the Nasdaq under the edgy ticker symbol LGBT. Direct holders include PlanetOut co-founder Mark Elderkin and PlanetOut board member Jeffrey Soukup.
Today the new gay megacorp claims that “more than 3.5 million active members on PlanetOut's flagship sites, Gay.com and PlanetOut.com, make up a virtual metropolis that is bigger than the city of Chicago. The LGBT community now represents a reported buying power of $485 billion annually in the United States alone and FORTUNE 500 advertisers are taking notice.”
Though successful lesbian websites like LesbiaNation.com already exist, PlanetOut plans to launch a huge new women’s site. Meanwhile the corporation is forging into cable TV, through a partnership with the new 24/7 gay channel LOGO (owned by MTV). It’s also pushing into broadband video through a partnership with Q Television (owned by Triangle Multi-Media Limited, Inc.) PlanetOut Video will carry QTN’s original programming.
Triangle Multi-Media is another gay-owned mini-empire, albeit a smaller one. With a startup in 1991, it owns several subsidiaries besides QTV, and has its corporate headquarters in Palm Springs, CA. When TMM tried to get satellite access with Dish Network, the deal fell through. But TMM survived to be publicly traded under the symbol QBID. In September 2005, Triangle finally got its satellite doorway with the $5 million purchase of Network Teleports (NTI). The big outlay worried Triangle shareholders, but CEO Olsen reassured them as QTN was ramping up with Time Warner Cable on the east coast and COX on the west coast.
Q Television even captured the position of official broadcaster for the 2006 Gay Games, and positions itself as the “voice of the LGBT community.”
So the “brave new gay world” spans a partnership between two mini-empires.
Free Markets vs. Free Voices
These are not the only LGBT mini-empires out there, but they are the biggest ones that are now publicly traded. (The second largest gay-owned media firm, Gaywired.com, is still privately owned.) They show how big and powerful the collective LGBT media “critical mass” is getting.
Concerned observers like Michael Bronski have been asking questions about gay media corporatization for several years, going back to LPI’s acquisition of Out. Former Out publisher Henry Scott, who had resigned from the magazine prior to the LPI buyout, was so worried about merger-mania that he tried to interest the Justice Department in doing some good old-fashioned trust-busting on LPI.
But as Bronski put it, “What are the chances of the Feds stepping in to ensure a free market for all queer voices? If the Time Warner-AOL merger didn’t bother them, who is going to care about this?”
The questions are many. How much of a real “community voice” will these pink giants offer to their pink consumers? Just because an LGBT media giant allows individuals to sound off in bulletin boards and chat rooms doesn’t mean that public citizens will get to have any real leverage over policy at the top—unless, of course, they launch a successful boycott or have the money to buy a controlling number of stocks.
And how accountable to the “gay community” will these corporations be—especially in instances where they might have to choose between having a social conscience and making a lot of money? In the mainstream, accountability is sometimes referred to as “the public trust.” What about public trust in our world?
Where LGBT book business is concerned—what kind of growth possibilities can we expect for the LGBT book industry amid all this mauve merger-mania?
The Alyson Journey
In 1980, only a handful of gay-owned small presses existed, including Gay Sunshine and Calamus. Most LGBT books of that era (including my own novels) had been published by big mainstream houses, most of whom had already been bought up by bigger corporations. So eastern gay activist Sasha Alyson saw the opportunity, scratched a little venture capital together and launched his own publishing company. A marketing visionary, Sasha helped pioneer the idea of books for teens like Reflections of a Rock Lobster and children’s books like Heather Has Two Mommies. When he also started a newspaper, Boston Bay Windows, Sasha become an early model of the gay media mogul.
In 1996 he sold his publishing company to LPI and moved on into the travel business, where he continued to enjoy success. Meanwhile his brain-child went on to become the biggest gay-owned book publisher, with over 50 new titles a year. Heather Has Two Mommies is still a big seller today.
But all was not cookies and cream. As a side effect of the PlanetOut buyout, Alyson got a major shakeup, with publisher Greg Constante being ousted and some other staff leaving as well. The Alyson offices were swiftly moved from their L.A. haunts to New York City, where they share space with the LPI magazine group.
Today Alyson’s new management aims to shed what they view as a dated small-press image and go mainstream, with non-gay titles in the mix. Says Dale Cunningham, Alyson’s new publisher: “As an established specialty publisher, Alyson is well poised to develop and position new titles for multiple channels, including mainstream crossover. I look forward to enhancing opportunities for Alyson authors so that their voices may be heard and appreciated in a wider variety of outlets and venues made possible with LPI Media support. I think we're entering a very exciting period of growth for Alyson."
Alyson will get a handsome market share from the partnering between PlanetOut and Triangle Multi-Media, with its books being marketed into that broad span of “multiple channels.” These include print and electronic media, television, cable, broadband, the Web, even satellite radio.
Benefit # 1 would be the vast advertising access to potential LGBT book-buyers, as well as to non-gay buyers who are sympathetic or simply curious. Alyson is automatically guaranteed this market share—as is any outside book corporation or large independent publisher who has the pile of cash needed to buy ads in this imperial-size marketplace. Benefit #2 would be the wider reach of pure visibility—from cover stories, reviews, talk shows, gossip columns, buzz, links to major online book retailers, etc. etc.—all of which will help any publisher to move a lot of books.
Naturally I wish Alyson well, and hope they (and their authors who are owed royalties) can laugh all the way to the pink bank. But what about the dozens of small presses and independently publishing authors—those who give meaning to the word “diversity” in our literary world? Will they gain any significant access to the Empire’s market share?
For some years already, the ad rates of our national media have been set high in order to tap the fat ad budgets of big mainstream corporations. For example, The Advocate’s 2006 rate sheet, which is posted online, shows a one-page 4-color ad going for $11,440 for a one-time insertion. Even a black-and-white one-pager sells for $8190. That outlay for one ad could equal a small press’s entire gross income for one quarter. As a result, some of our small publishers—who may publish books good enough to win Lambda book awards—can’t afford to advertise nationally to their own book-buying public.
The question is, will books’ market access improve now that merger-mania is running the show? We book people hope it will be so.
Pink Pie
As I wrote this, I took a look at the book section of PlanetOut’s website. It’s not too impressive—the content is minimal, pre-digested, and politically predictable. It consists mainly of short lists of book recommendations, plus a few interviews with “greats” like Gore Vidal. In other words, it looks like not a lot of yeasty thought has gone into creating this section.
The main book-sale links are politically revealing—they take you to mainstream corporations, namely InSightOut Book Club and the gay-book section at BarnesandNoble.com. (InsightOut is owned by the same mainstream media empire that owns Book of the Month Club.)
I’m not one who decries mainstream interest in our markets—indeed, I am an author who benefited from chain-store and book-club sales of my works for 30 years, so I recognize that big business moves a lot of LGBT books. But I do feel that community-owned book business deserves to get a bigger piece of the pink pie. Hopefully PlanetOut will move to fulfill CEO Selvin’s glowing promise that “other LGBT media” will get a chance to “grow their products”—including our book products.
Looking elsewhere, LGBT book people can see that our national print media are not very book-friendly any more—though they’ve gotten very TV-friendly, movie-friendly and mainstream-celebrity-friendly. The magazines with the most subscribers review only a fraction of the many LGBT titles that are published each year. There’s also a limit to the feature and interview opportunities that LGBT magazines currently offer. Not to mention the limited number of chances to publish a book-related commentary or a first-serial chunk of your book. With the added new frontiers of LGBT television, there are only so many chances to be an author guest on the existing cable talk shows, or have your book developed into a gay TV series.
All in all, there’s room for improvement in how the gay media empires deal with gay book products.
Vote of Confidence
The dangers of merger-mania are already well-documented by the last 30 years of American history. Often stockholders or top executives make a lot of money – but promised benefits to “the public” don’t always materialize. The list of PlanetOut’s institutional and mutual-fund holders includes some big household names—Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, etc. USAToday stated that “PlanetOut has broken new ground by meeting the requirements for longevity and stability to get listed on Nasdaq,” and quoted stockbroker Walter Schubert (who founded Gay Financial Network) to that effect. Major investment in PlanetOut appears to be a vote of confidence by Wall Street. I hope so, and say “goddess speed” to the pink media empires. Hopefully that $485-billion pink market is really out there. Hopefully pink ink can even help overwrite the glaring red ink of a near-bankrupt American economy.
But confidence or no confidence, the questions about access still hang in the air. To put it another way—it’s going to take more than promises and PC book lists to keep a major genre of books thriving with all its diversity and richness, as it has for the last 40 years.
For those of us in the gay book business who feel that books are becoming the stepchildren of LGBT culture, only time will tell if—and how—all of our authors, publishers and retailers can enter the “brave new world” of that pink American dream.
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Further reading:
Direct and institutional holders of PlanetOut stocks listed at http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=LGBT.
Michael Bronski on gay media mergers
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/documents/00644217.htm
Mergers, Acquisitions and Access: A Backgrounder
http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/libraries/lisa4/Robertson.pdf
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Author’s note:
Patricia Nell Warren, author of bestselling novels like The Front Runner and The Wild Man, is also known for nonfiction writings on a variety of subjects, from history to censorship. She writes a controversial monthly column for A & U Magazine, "Left Field," where she covers the politics surrounding AIDS. Her series on gay sports pioneers at Outsports.com has broken new ground. Last but not least, she has also made herself known as a commentator and analyst on the publishing and writing scene, with a series of help articles available at http://www.wildcatintl.com/partners/pnw/secrets/index.html.
Warren can be emailed at patriciawarren@aol.com.
Copyright © 2006 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.