The nation's two leading gay print magazines, Out and The Advocate, were, until this month, owned by PlanetOut Partners. In a deal that's just closed, they are now the property of Regent Entertainment, the gay-focused entertainment company behind pay-channel Here! TV, which picked up the magazines for a song: $6 million, paid in a complex (read: we still don't understand it) advertising deal that didn't involve cash. That's because PlanetOut is basically a junk bond, carrying so much debt even Bill Gates' attempt to save it with a cash infusion didn't work. How come? Because somehow, even with all those ad dollars leaving television and fueling the Internet and niche markets like GLBT, the magazines are suffering. But also because it's generally accepted knowledge that the gays don't need a gay magazine anymore; Details and GQ are filling the void for fashion and lifestyle, while blogs like our own Queerty is where they're going for the news. Which explains why The Advocate, once the place for gay news, is admitting it's losing the battle to survive:

It's going monthly.

That's bad news, because The Advocate is a bi-weekly magazine. But like Time or Newsweek, the era of a news magazine coming out so frequently is passing.

Jon Barrett, who was named the mag's editor in May, agrees: "I don't think there is a need for a biweekly magazine anymore with the Web."

So he's going with fewer issues, but higher quality: better paper stock, "bigger stories" and "better writers" he says.

But also, this: "You will see more news in the magazine."

And that's where he fumbles. Isn't the point of decreasing the frequency of the magazine a chance to move away from news? It's silly to think The Advocate can be, or has been for months or the last year or two, the place to break news. With an entire month between issues now, the relevance of those news articles is going to become even more meaningless.

And therein lies the problem of publishing both Out and The Advocate: While Aaron Hicklin has overseen a resurgence with Out — it's thicker, better designed, and more readable than ever — he's also cut out the gay lifestyle market from its own sister pub, The Advocate. And while The Advocate was never supposed to be about lifestyle — it's a news rag — it doesn't have much of a chance to evolve given that Out has snagged the logical "next step" territory.

For what it's worth, despite Barret's near-impossible task, he will be making one more his readership will probably appreciate. Says the Bay Area Reporter: "Among other changes Barrett has in store is a move away from covers featuring entertainers; for example, he said that he doesn't think the magazine needs to feature a cover shot of straight man who is playing a gay role."

"And of course, the question of what it's like to kiss a man," Barrett said, referencing a frequent question posed to straight actors in such interviews.

"I don't think our readers want to read those stories anymore," he said, adding that those features were needed in the 1990s, when it was validating to many LGBTs.

[Queerty, Towleroad]