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Update: It’s not just Southern Voice that’s shut down, it’s all of Window Media. This means the Washington Blade has also shut down.
~~Autumn~~
It’s hard to tell what is going on at the moment, but Project Q Atlanta reports that employees of Southern Voice arrived to a note taped to the window of the office and the door locks had been changed. It’s not clear at this time what has happened to flagship sister pub the Washington Blade.
The publishers of Southern Voice and David Atlanta magazine-along with a handful of other gay publications-abruptly closed its doors over the weekend, ending a months-long battle with a federal receivership that has imperiled the gay media company.
A three-sentence notice was posted to the front door of the Window Media office in Atlanta before employees arrived Monday morning. It was signed by Publisher Steve Myers and longtime Window executive Mike Kitchens.
The message greeting SoVo staff:
It is with GREAT regret that we must inform you that effective immediately, the operations of Window Media, LLC and Unite Media, LLC have closed down.Please return to this office on WEDNESDAY, November 18th, 2009 at 11:00 AM to collect personal belongings and to receive information on your separation stipulations. Please bring boxes and/or containers that will allow you to collect all your personal belongings at one time.
Regretfully,
Steve Myers
Mike Kitchens
Creative Loafing noted that change was in the air when this trouble emerged earlier in the year:
In February, the NYC-based Gay City News reported that the Avalon Equity Fund,
a parent companyshareholder in SoVo, Washington Blade and several other gay publications’ parent company Unite Media, had been forced into liquidation and faced federal receivership. People familiar with the matter recently told CL they were unaware of the company’s fate.
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Nothing yetas to what others specifically are involved. But the story was picked up by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
‘David’ is goneFound this update via Creative Loafing.
Washington Blade next?
Ft Lauderdale’s South Florida Blade? Nothing yet on either.
Richard Eldredge in Atlanta is Twittering updates…
This from Queerty makes it sounds like ALL of Window Media’s pubs are gone.
Looks like the LGBT mediawill be largely digital from now on. As i understand it, even the magazines have been struggling.
This is the same thingthat happened in Boston. In Newsweekly was bought by the Washington Blade and a few months later the newly titled New England Blade closed up shop and everyone was out of business.
TrueAnd, in that regard, the digital divide (which still exists) is a worrisome thing.
(But does this affect the digital versions of these print LGBT media as well?)
On the other hand, I have heard a lot of complaints about LGBT print media, especially the magazines.
It’s called progressI’m sad to hear the Windows Media publications are kaput. But let’s face it, the net has impacted people and companies globally for years now – even this popular blog has helped it happen. They cannot compete easily, ad revenues have been down everywhere, and people won’t pay for it.
Until they can find a way to cover operating costs, they won’t survive, so we will have to find our news in other ways. The public is very fickle anyway, and will cross the street for 3 cents.
It’s the same as what Walmart has done to Mainstreet. Compete or die, mostly die because they cannot compete.
I guess “niche audiences” are only supposed to go to the internet nowThe Advocate, Ebony, Jet, So Vo … not to mention the long gone Clik.
There is something disturbing about the failure/closure of these media outlets that goes beyond the logic of “that’s progress and they failed to move with the times.”
It’s almost as if minority populations are showing no regard for the publications that chronicled their history.
I’m very suspicious about “online only” journalism as a business because I don’t see how people will get paid.
I suppose we can ask the Gill Foundation, HRC, or other rich benefactors to publish media as a charity or a funded grant, but I’m not sure about that either.
Lets do some analysisIs it simply the impact of the internet? I’m not naive enough to say that it has had no impact or even that it has not had a major impact.
But – have we not seen enough corporate
devouringconsolidation outside of LGBT-ness to see that it NEVER serves the public at large? Another commenter mentioned Wal-Mart. What Wal-Mart does isn’t capitalism; its government-aided (by omission) bullying. Writing off its casualties as ‘not being able to compete’ is tantamount to saying that a gay-bashing victim ‘had it coming.’More than a few people have come to see HRC as the Wal-Mart of LGB(T) rights organizations.
As for the Washington Blade?
I have long referred to the Washington Blade (and its hoding company, collectively) as ‘Queer Channel Media,’ because it has long been an LGB(T) print/net equivalent to broadcast media’s Clear Channel Media – a conglomerate which incessantly claims it merely operates in line with market forces, yet has a clear agenda that it advances irrespective of the market and/or Arbitron. That agenda is not always evident from what any particular of its stations broadcasts, but it is crystal clear from how it controls the market and prevents any discussion – measured qualtitatively and qualitatively – that it doesn’t desire.
I lament the loss of local, legit LGB(T) media which occurred anytime that Queer Channel Media gobbled up something local and/or indirectly caused something local to simply go away. I lament the loss of coverage that will likely occur in the future (gee…just in time for what will be a heating up of things regarding ENDA….)
Yet, I can’t quite muster any tears for the entity that, for too long, gave Chris Crain free reign to opine that trans people had ‘trans-jacked’ ENDA.
how is it different to what happened to other gay businessesOnce upon a time, our community supported our gay travel agents, bookstores, florists, etc. But then the internet brought the ease of buying online. Now the “roaming gnome” and other mega travel companies have nearly destroyed the small gay travel agencies that used to be how Atlanta, RSVP, etc. was sold.
Think FTD hasn’t cut into the local gay florist’s business? The list goes on. There is no loyalty anymore, that is the state of today’s business world reality.
I have been disappointed in the Washington Blade for some timeSmaller pubs do such a better job in reporting.
And has anyone here frequented the comments section of the Blade’s site? They repeatedly let anti-gay voices run or ruin the conversations, taking no or the wrong action.
I suspected bad management, just from seeing that. They allowed terrible things in there for all weekend while they were not working I guess.
I’m not surprised. Be quality or you won’t be.
Mixed feelings right now…On one hand, Window Media had it coming. They thought they were “too big to fail”, but they really took on more than they could handle. And with a combination of the recession and the death of print media, I guess this was inevitable.
But OTOH, it’s just horrifying to see “the gay media” vanish like this so quickly. The Washington Blade was “the LGBT paper of record” for 40 years, and Southern Voice was a much needed voice for Atlanta’s LGBT community for 20 years. What happens now? Where do people turn for news, especially those who can’t click onto The Blend or Bilerico online?
Two thoughts:You make a very good point, brokebackvol.
1. Shutting down the gATM is great and all, but by not preferentially supporting LGBT-owned businesses, the chances are very, very high that your money is going to fund the very people that wish to deny us basic rights anyway. Think about that the next time you make any purchase. Where do you think the the churches get their money? From small and medium business owners. So if you are serious about putting away your gATM card for politicians, be consistent and also make sure you aren’t donating directly to the Sunday collection basket.
The Catholic Church gets this; witness the latest encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate” (Latin: “Charity in Truth” or “Love in Truth”) released last June. Reading between the Love and Truth verbage, it basically spells out for the Faithful that charity is fine and dandy, but only if you are using to change the world according to Catholic values. Where you spend your money makes a difference!
2. This speaks more to other posts than this one, but this sort of thing has sadly been going on for a while now. Every time there is a boom, good companies get bought up on what is essentially borrowed or leveraged money. Then in the bust the foundation-less parent company fails due to a bad business model. The only bright side that I can see is that post-bust it creates a wide open market for new blood.
And, what happened to the archives?
Pam,If you need me to help with coverage of a major event in DC, let me know. I do have full-time job, but many things occur in DC during my lunch break or after hours that I can go to.
Hope that the WayBackMachine will allow access
Doesn’t the WBM only grab front pages?If there had been even a day’s notice it would have been trivial to do a wget on the entire site.
that is the kind of thing that concerns me about online mediaSomeone in the LGBT community needs to come up with a plan for archiving the information once a site closes down.
Without one, it’s as if all those stories did not happen.
Other Southeast LGBT Newspaper Publications?I know of Q-Notes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q…
I’ve made the mistake before of thinking they were more locally oriented, but apparently they have a fairly broad reach. I’m sad to hear of such a giant falling, but maybe other papers like this one can use it as an opportunity for expansion?
Are there other gay newspaper publications in the southeast?
I’m not sure of its specsYou’re more likely to get a hit for a front page, but if you actually have a deep-link URL – and if the page was in existence for a while – you’ve got a good shot at finding it on the WBM.
PDF dumpsI do my best to do a PDF dump of any page that I even think I might have cause to cite either in scholarly article or online. While not a perfect substitute should the page disappear, its better than nothing.
…They got rid of those anti-gay voices some time ago; I assume that they banned the relevant person(s) although it took them forever to do so.
During that, they added a moderation system that was broken as you would have lurkers modding almost every comment down (after the apparent ban), you could mod your own comments up or down, and there was an incentive to not use the reply system for those being modded down because it would cause their comments to stay visible.
Considering how few stories they had, I’m not sure why they didn’t just manually moderate. That would have been much better than their useless automatic system.
exactlyI’m so glad I’m not the only one that noticed. Even after they got rid of those people though, they came back, and then the voting system wouldn’t work except for people somehow hacking it. And they just wouldn’t fix it or get rid of it, which was so insulting to their gay readers and commentors, which made me wonder if it was even gay people running it in the first place. Weird. Glad you noticed.