March 30 - April 6, 2000
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Gay and wired
PlanetOut's bold move shows that community, not content, is king. Plus, voting on the Net, and Disney sees the open-access light.
by Dan Kennedy
The sale of the Advocate and Out magazines to the gay-and-lesbian Web site PlanetOut is the latest example of the ascendance of new media over old. It's also a sign that the wave of consolidations afflicting mainstream media has washed into alternative media as well. More than anything, though, the deal underscores the fact that, on the Internet, the ancient (circa 1996) adage "Content is king" is just plain wrong. The real value of the Net lies in building interactive communities, a paradigm in which content is just one ingredient.
PlanetOut, based in San Francisco and founded just five years ago, has some 450,000 registered users and attracts an estimated 1.2 million "unique visitors" each month. By contrast, the 34-year-old Advocate, a biweekly, has a circulation of 88,000, and the monthly Out, which was founded in 1992 and which the Advocate's parent company is in the process of acquiring, has a circulation of 115,000. So the PlanetOut deal is not comparable to America Online's acquisition of Time Warner, in which AOL cashed in on its sky-high stock valuation to buy a company with far more revenues and customers (think Time, Sports Illustrated, CNN, music, films, cable franchises). PlanetOut is already the Big Kahuna of the gay-and-lesbian media, at least in terms of sheer numbers. Its acquisition of the Advocate and Out merely strengthens that dominant position.
"What's so great about the Internet is that people get to participate," says PlanetOut's CEO, Megan Smith. How important is that? Smith says PlanetOut's users spend an average of two-thirds of their time on community-related activities -- message boards, chat rooms, shopping, personal ads, and the like -- and just one-third on content. The formula works because gays and lesbians make up an identifiable community of shared interests.
"The main thing you need is a strong enough affinity," says Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community. "Obviously there is a community and an affinity among gay people that there isn't among people who buy books at Amazon."
The Internet is also a compelling medium for the gay community because, in a culture that remains deeply homophobic, anonymity can be a blessing. The Net gives teenagers and even closeted adults a chance to explore the gay world at a time when they're not ready to come out. "When I was closeted, I wouldn't even go into a gay bar," says Walter Schubert, the chairman and CEO of the Gay Financial Network. "I wouldn't get a publication like Out or the Advocate, and I wouldn't be caught dead reading them. The Internet is where people can take their first timid steps out of the closet."
The downside to the PlanetOut deal -- a cash-and-stock transaction estimated at $30 million -- is that it threatens to narrow the range of voices in gay media, paralleling the process by which a handful of giant media corporations have come to control nearly all of our important newspapers, magazines, television networks, record labels, and film studios. It was only recently that Liberation Publications, the parent company of the Advocate, moved to scoop up Out. Now Liberation itself will be subsumed. (A source told the Phoenix that there may be some dissension when the Liberation board votes on the sale.)
PlanetOut's Smith says the magazines will remain as stand-alone print publications, and will keep their own Web sites (www.advocate.com and www.out.com). The end result, she argues, will be better distribution, as PlanetOut will feature Advocate and Out content on its own site and on the gay-related content areas PlanetOut maintains on AOL, Yahoo, Lycos, and several other portals.
But a writer who has contributed to the Advocate and Out, and who asked not to be identified, worries that the merger will tend to "homogenize gay culture," adding, "There are increasingly few voices in gay and lesbian publications." Advocate editor-in-chief Judy Wieder, though enthusiastic about the opportunity to expand her readership, concedes that the magazine must be careful to maintain its independence and integrity. "If any of those goals get compromised in a major way, it wouldn't work," she says.
Elizabeth Weise, secretary of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, says that the real story behind the merger is that PlanetOut has been able to raise $19 million in venture capital in order to pull off such acquisitions. "Historically there hasn't been this kind of money in gay media," says Weise, who covers technology for USA Today. "Everyone else has gotten used to seeing these huge amounts of money flung about. Now it's our turn." Indeed, the clout and increasing visibility of the gay market is the best guarantee that the gay media will remain diverse. The Gay Financial Network's Schubert notes that, even now, new gay Web sites are in the works. "To me, it's like looking out on your front lawn," he comments. "I don't want to liken them to weeds, but new ones are going to crop up all the time."
Without question, the biggest loser in the PlanetOut deal is its online competitor, Gay.com, which is also based in San Francisco. Not only did Gay.com see its rival scoop up the most recognizable brand names in gay media, but it will also have to give up its current content partnership with the Advocate. But Smith says she still sees Gay.com as a "serious competitor," and well she should: Gay.com has raised millions in venture capital, and recently announced a partnership with the New York Times.
According to a new study by Computer Economics, the number of gay and lesbian Internet users will grow from 13.5 million to 22.4 million between 2001 and 2005. That should be enough to keep both PlanetOut and Gay.com going -- and maybe even a bumper crop of new weeds.
Patricia White, the 30-year-old daughter of former Boston mayor Kevin White, is engaged in a different type of online community-building. As the president and founder of the Massachusetts Voting Internet Project, White is the head of a nascent campaign to allow voters to cast their ballots on the Internet. She is hoping to place a nonbinding referendum question on the state ballot this fall that would direct the legislature to study the issue.
"This new medium has a tremendous potential to increase voter turnout," says White, who works for the political Web site Voter.com and who ran unsuccessfully for the Governor's Council in 1998. "It's going to engage people in the process who are not engaged now -- namely, younger voters." She points to a recent USA Today poll in which 77 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 25 said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online.
An energetic campaigner, White has been talking up Internet voting to anyone who'll listen. Recently she spent an hour fielding calls -- many of them skeptical -- on Michael Goldman and Tom Moroney's Saturday talk show on WRKO Radio (AM 680). She's also lining up some impressive supporters, including former Democratic National Committee chairman and possible gubernatorial candidate Steve Grossman and Commonwealth Education Project director George Pillsbury, who heads a get-out-the-vote effort called Boston Vote.
But though the idea holds appeal for those distressed by low voter turnout, there are plenty of problems. Some of them are practical. Arizona, which allowed Internet voting in its recent Democratic presidential primary, was hit with technical glitches, including a bug that made it impossible for many Macintosh users to cast ballots. In addition, questions about security have yet to be answered fully, and concerns that poor and minority voters may be left behind prompted a lawsuit in Arizona that nearly resulted in the experiment's being dropped.
White concedes those concerns, saying Internet voting should not begin until 2004 at the earliest, and that a referendum campaign would be "a great opportunity" to address issues such as the "digital divide" separating affluent, Internet-savvy suburbanites from poorer, unwired city dwellers.
Harder to address, though, are the intangibles. Taking some of the inconvenience out of voting is a good thing. Proposals to allow weekend voting, or to turn election days into holidays, would surely make it easier for non-voters to become voters. But voting is one of our few civic rituals; there is something qualitatively different about sitting alone in front of a computer rather than standing in line at a fire station, interacting with neighbors and sign-toting poll workers.
Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says Internet voting would probably result in a slight rise in turnout, but he adds that it addresses merely the symptoms of civic disengagement. "Over the course of the last 30 years, Americans have been much more disconnected, not only from government and politics, but from one another and from clubs and organizations," says Putnam, who is best known for the "bowling alone" thesis that cites, among other things, the decline of bowling leagues as evidence of this disconnection.
Patricia White and Steve Grossman, though, say Internet voting shouldn't be looked at as a solitary activity, but, rather, as a way of building online communities around government and politics. They point to a new world of online discussion groups, information about candidates and issues, and opportunities to question candidates directly. The Internet, in this view, serves as a tool not to reinforce solitary instincts but to bring people together.
"I certainly am all for the civic experience of voting, but by the same token people are getting their information in very different ways than ever before," says Grossman, who adds that Internet politicking could "open up the process" and foster "a genuine civic debate."
It's an optimistic vision, and one that deserves an airing. Somehow, though, it seems inevitable that moving the public's business into the private sphere will change the experience in ways that we may come to regret.
Apparently there's a limit to how much media consolidation even the Walt Disney Company can stomach. According to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, Disney, major music companies, and about 10 Internet service providers have been swarming over Capitol Hill, asking some difficult questions about the pending merger of America Online and Time Warner. Disney and these other companies are reportedly worried that AOL will ban content from competitors, and will prevent Internet providers from gaining access to its newly acquired cable-television lines. (Disclosure: until last week I owned some AOL stock, which I had purchased long before the merger.)It's about time someone with clout (i.e., money enough to make large campaign contributions) spoke out against this sleazy deal. Before the merger earlier this year, AOL had been a leader in calling for the Federal Communications Commission to require cable companies to sell Internet access to all comers, as phone companies are already required to do. Since acquiring Time Warner's cable lines, though, AOL has backed off, calling for "voluntary" efforts.
The stakes in this battle are enormous. This is not just a matter of the cable companies' being forced to open up their lines to competition, although that would be a worthy enough goal. Rather, the real battle is to prevent the cable companies from changing the open nature of the Internet -- for instance, by severely restricting the transmission of Internet video, which might compete with their own cable offerings, and by shutting out public, nonprofit content.
Disney CEO Michael Eisner, of course, is not to be trusted any more than AOL chairman Steve Case or Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin. But if commercial imperatives have put Eisner on the side of open-access activists, then all hail the Mouse.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
