Media Coverage: Weaving a Homogenous Web?

by Katie Szymanski, San Francisco Bay Area Reporter, November 23, 2000

Reviews were mixed last week as PlanetOut.com and Gay.com announced their plans to merge and effectively form one leading Internet source for LGBT news, politics, and community exchange. Gay.com's CEO, Lowell Selvin, and PlanetOut's chief, Megan Smith, will pair up to become CEO and president, respectively, of PlanetOut Partners Inc. There will be some workforce reductions, and the companies will likely share an office when the deal is finalized within the year. The once-rival businesses from San Francisco will now pool their resources and individual features to create, as they said, "a multi-faceted global media and services company" that immediately reaches 3.5 million monthly users, not to mention both sides' corporate partnerships.

Some LGBT people expressed concern that the newly-formed alliance would lead to less diversity in media options, excluding marginalized populations and presenting to the world one voice by which all LGBT people will be characterized. PlanetOut, of course, already owns the country's two biggest gay glossies, the Advocate and Out magazines, and affiliate publications such as the AIDS magazine HIV Plus.

Indeed this fear of homogeneity is hardly unfounded, judging from the recent presidential endorsements; it was shocking to read the praises of George W. Bush in the liberal Boulder, Colorado newspaper, but further investigation revealed the exact editorial appearing in newspapers across the country owned by the same conglomerate. As large companies swallow up smaller media, the same situation repeats itself: the editorial board is beholden to an ownership that may dictate not only content but bias, as a company that owns all the small papers can do whatever it wants without worrying about readership, for there is no competition.

This potentially narrow scope is what worries the gay newspaper Southern Voice, published out of Atlanta.

"When upstart Out landed on the scene in 1992, the mag was a kick in the pants for the elder Advocate, and the two competed to break stories and stimulate readers," said a November 16 editorial that pointed to the two magazines' now-identical formats and new censorship policies as deplorable.

"It's putting more power in fewer hands," agreed New York-based activist Bill Dobbs. "It's worrisome. With the concentration of ownership of media outlets in fewer hands the manipulation of information is easier, and minority populations are most vulnerable to that."

Almost as if anticipating a backlash, the big players at Gay.com and PlanetOut.com emphasized to the Bay Area Reporter that the merger would in fact create room for more, not less, diversity. Yes, the merger was born because the two sites seemed to be endlessly competing for each other's content, a scenario that appeared likely to result in the future loss of one of the mammoths. But PlanetOut's Smith said that creating a large giant will ensure a diversity of voices because it will create leverage with advertisers.

"Part of this merger is much more about creating a corporate backbone," Smith told the B.A.R. "Our community has lots of different voices, so we need lots of different products, and this partnership allows us to present to advertisers our community in all of its diversity."

A quick look at both Web sites indicates that those new products – anything serious, anyway – will be marketed predominately to white people. The people of color represented on both PlanetOut.com and Gay.com seem permanently relegated to the personals pages.

Inside the companies themselves, Smith could not provide specific diversity statistics for her workforce, but estimated that 20-30 percent of both companies are heterosexual.

But if a diversity scarcity is already the situation at both companies, it's probably true that less diversity couldn't happen as a result of the merger.

Gay.com's Selvin said that the coming together could only improve representation, as evidenced by the site's election night coverage.

"We had everyone from Bruce Vilanch and Kate Clinton to Tammy Baldwin and David Mixner online, interacting in real time with thousands of users," said Selvin. "This isn't a quieting of voices, it's an amplification."

Selvin did acknowledge, however, that opening up that number two spot by forming one leading company did not necessarily leave room for other online gay markets to grow.

"It would be very difficult to fill that slot," said Selvin, "since we are truly so much larger than the next number two."

PlanetOut's funding, about $10 million, includes sponsorship from America Online. AOL, a business known for alleged homophobic censorship and of course the infamous outing of Navy man Timothy McVeigh to the United States military, engages in a "very productive church and state relationship" with PlanetOut, according to Smith. "We are allowed to be critical of them and make suggestions. And they have in fact been a leader in supporting our community, defending gay and lesbian chat rooms long before they caught on."

Gay.com's $23 million in contributions comes from Chase Capital Partners, Flatiron Partners, and other financial backers.

Correction that appeared in Dec 7, 2000 issue--

"...Also in the November 23 issue, in a story about the PlanetOut and Gay.com merger, the Bay Area Reporter stated that PlanetOut 'already owns the country's two biggest glossies, the Advocate and Out magazines.' In fact, while PlanetOut.com and Liberation Publications (publishers of the Advocate, Out, and Alyson Books) have signed a letter of intent to merge, the final contract has not yet been signed. "

top of page