Howl of the Day: Feb 25, 2016

It is now old news that rise of digital media has upset the entire publishing world. With almost everything just a click away on the internet (and free to anyone with flexible morals and a modicum of technical ability), traditional publishers are scrambling to adapt. Some are trying to fit digital publication within their existing business model, bringing their content to the web on their terms, while others are trying to wholely reinvent themselves for the digital age.

The proverbial canary in the re-invention mine is Playboy, which recently announced a plan to drastically change its focus, dropping the nudes in favour of more long-form journalism. This is, as Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive told the New York Times, part of a project to remake itself into a competitor to VICE, a somewhat less racy “bad-boy” magazine that specializes in investigative journalism on provocative and politically incorrect subjects.

Over at CNN, Peggy Drexler lauds the intelligence behind Playboy’s business decisions over the last sixty years and ascribes this most recent move to that same power. In her view, the shrewd business people at Playboy, Inc. have observed that pornography is now practically ubiquitous in its availability, and that Playboy cannot therefore be competitive any longer as a purveyor of exposed flesh. “The media landscape is ever evolving, and Playboy is simply moving with the times,” she argues. “People did, and do, read Playboy: They may have come for the nudity, but they stayed for the articles.”

Others are less impressed. “What made Playboy popular to begin with?” asked Hustler founder-publisher Larry Flynt in a CNN Money interview. “It wasn’t the interviews. It wasn’t the editorial content. It was the centerfold. They’re taking out the main event. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Drexler cites increased traffic on Playboy’s website as evidence that the new model of non-nude models is already working. But this is obviously premature. Indeed, much of that is probably just reaction to the news. Culture vultures circling around a corpse, as it were.

And, as circulation expert John Harrington noted in an interview with the New York Post, the magazine’s reputation is hardly going to change over night: “I don’t think Walmart will ever carry it. There may be a few bookstores and gas stations that start carrying it, but I don’t see it going on sale in major supermarket chains anytime. It may be a case of too little, too late.”

If anything, it is a surprise that Playboy has lasted as long as it has, with ever dwindling subscriptions and readership (from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now). That probably has more to do with obstinacy and a blind faith in it’s own, largely self-declared cultural importance than it does with business acumen.

Now, with its cultural cachet on the wane, Playboy is trying to use its still-famous name as a wrapper for some still purportedly edgy, but more buttoned-up content. By dropping the nudes, but keeping the brand, Playboy is becoming a simulacrum of itself. The bunnies of the “sexual revolution” are gone, and all that is left are the garish bowties. Objectification without the object, if you will.

Playboy no longer has play. It is now no more than another silly boy’s mag, one with a few glossy pics of pretty girls with vacant eyes and a bunch of dumb articles about the ten most dangerous jobs or goriest ways to die. And most of the other silly boy’s mags are in trouble too. Playboy is clearly vying to be a somewhat more upscale and highbrow version of the type, but that won’t save it. The horse is dead, forget the flogging.

(Image: Photograph by Piergiuliano Chesi, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. Via Wikimedia Commons.)