For Gay Press, 'Good Old Days' Are HereNEW YORK For gay newspaper publishers, the good old days are now. "Compared to 23 years ago?" Publisher Tracy Baim says with a laugh, referring to the year the weekly Windy City Times was founded in Chicago. "I think it's a great time to be in gay publishing. It's so much easier than it was even 10 years ago to pitch to mainstream businesses"
Indeed, according to the Gay Press Report, advertising spending in publications, about half of them weekly newspapers targeting the so-called GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) audience, increased 205% between 1996 and 2006. Last year's ad revenues of $223.3 million represented an increase of 5.2% over the year before -- a period during which print and online ad spending on daily newspapers was essentially flat.
In 1994, just 19 Fortune 500 brands advertised in the gay press. Last year, 183 did.
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"In this market, people did have a dollar and a dream," says Todd Evans, president and CEO of Rivendell Media Inc., a gay media rep firm that produces the Gay Press Report with the ad agency Prime Access Inc. "You had a lot of people who were more about the cause than the business, and unfortunately you have to pay attention to business, too."
Ah, yes... "more about the cause than the business." I've seen that in a number of fields. I've been known to call such creatures "lifestylers." It's all about the lifestyle with them -- they don't so much want to run a newspaper (or a restaurant or a shop or a factory)... they want to be
seen to be running a newspaper. Thus they end up being nothing more than a packet of meaningless appearances and have no substance at all.
The Gay people would be well-served by any number of Gay-owned businesses. We are not served at all by the mere
appearance of such things.
