Okay, so I'm rewriting the headline of
this article in Media Post Publications talking about how ad sales are eroding at national gay mags like
OUT and
The Advocate. The money quote here is "
The latest report, released this May, had total advertising in gay media reaching $212 million. However, much of this budget goes to local gay publications including newspapers covering culture, leisure, and politics in specific cities or regions."
This is one of the reasons I really enjoy being a part of Frontiers. By serving Southern California's gay community, we're able to do a lot of things the nationals can't. We're not in the position of having to represent the gay community to a larger audience (read: straights)-- instead we are for the gay community. This isn't to say that national magazines aren't, but their higher profile force them to be more conservative and less critical (workshop activity: Compare Frontiers' coverage of the Q Channel debacle to The Advocate's*) of the community they serve. Being local allows Frontiers to be able to say "Hey, look at this awesome gay related thing" and "Hey, this thing about the gay community totally sucks. We should do something about it".
I think the era of advocacy journalism is over for the gay community. While it's important to show positive images of gay men and women (I used to write for the GenQ column in The Advocate for pretty much that reason), our community is more complex and diverse than ever and a local, on-the-ground perspective has really helped me, personally, get a better sense of what it means to be gay in America today. I hope readers of Frontiers get that same experience.
On the other hand, the story also mentions how more gay people are getting their news from the Internet, so nobody's resting on their laurels nowadays.
