Playboy owners may scrap magazine
LOS ANGELES — Newsstands in the United States soon could be stripped of one of the country’s most iconic publications — Playboy magazine.
Playboy Enterprises Inc. reportedly is considering killing the print edition, which was started more than six decades ago by Hugh Hefner, who died in September.
Famous for its racy images of naked women, the magazine launched Hefner’s Beverly Hillsbased publishing and entertainment empire. But Hefner’s death has triggered a process that will shift ownership of the company from his family to the largest shareholder, private equity firm Rizvi Traverse, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Ben Kohn, a managing partner at Rizvi who is Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, wants to shift the company’s emphasis to brand partnerships and licensing deals.
“We want to focus on what we call the world of Playboy, which is so much larger than a small, legacy print publication,” Kohn told the Journal. “We plan to spend 2018 transitioning it from a media business to a brandmanagement company.”
That shift involves seriously considering ending the print magazine, which began in 1953. U.S. circulation has dropped to less than 500,000 an issue from a peak of 5.6 million in 1975 amid struggles in the broader print magazine industry.
The Journal said Playboy’s print magazine, which now publishes six issues a year, has lost as much as $7 million US annually in recent years.
“Historically, we could justify the losses because of the marketing value, but you also have to be forward-thinking,” Kohn said. “I’m not sure that print is necessarily the best way to communicate to our consumer.”
In 2016, Playboy stopped publishing fully nude photos of women as part of a redesign of the print magazine that reflected the widespread availability of such imagery online. But last year, naked women were back in Playboy, and Cooper Hefner — the founder’s son and the company’s chief creative officer — said the ban was a mistake.
“Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem,” Cooper Hefner wrote on Twitter at the time. “Today, we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”
Rizvi Traverse helped Hugh Hefner take Playboy private in 2011 and received control of nearly two-thirds of the company. As part of the deal, Rizvi Traverse agreed to keep publishing the magazine for as long as Hefner lived.