Chris Crain is inarguably at the top of the gay newspaper heap. A 36-year-old former lawyer, Crain is the editorial director of Window Media, an Atlanta-based company that owns the New York Blade News, Washington Blade, Houston Voice, Southern Voice, a nightlife guide called Eclipse and a quarterly glossy, SOVO. That makes Window Media the largest gay newspaper company in America?reaching about 400,000 people a week, and employing more full-time journalists than The Advocate.
Crain lives in Atlanta with his boyfriend of more than seven years, Dale Stafford. He recently stopped by New York Press' offices and stretched his 6-foot-7 frame while discussing the state of gay media, his strategy to dominate the gay newspaper business and why reporters should keep asking Rosie O'Donnell that question.
Tell me about your background and how you got to this point.
I am a Southerner. I was born in Arkansas and grew up in Memphis. I went to college in Tennessee at Vanderbilt, and to Harvard Law School up in Boston, which was my first exposure to the North. I worked in Washington for a few years out of law school. Fell in love with that city. I ended up moving to Atlanta, for love. That was six years ago. But I practiced law for a long time, maybe six or seven years. It was challenging, but it didn't fulfill me. And I don't know, one of the things about discovering my own?being gay?was that I think I look for a little more fulfillment from my professional life than I would've otherwise, because I didn't have a wife and kids. So I think that I just demanded more from my career than it could give, practicing law.
I wanted to get back into journalism, which I'd done in college and after college. I'd worked for the morning daily in Nashville, the Tennessean, for about a year. So I applied for the managing editor job at Southern Voice, which paid probably a fifth of what I was making as a lawyer. They wouldn't even interview me because they knew the salary difference was so great. I thought, "Well, if I can't get a job there, I'll put together a group of people to buy the paper." And that's what we did. We put together a group of investors who saw the potential of the newspaper and we bought it. We had the concept of putting a newspaper group together from the very beginning, because it's worked in all other forms of media, including straight newspapers, so why not in the gay press?
I'm wondering, given the current advertising recession, how does being a larger media company help you?
The national ads are the ones that really hurt, that had the biggest decline. We didn't see much of a drop in local ads at any of our papers. Some of the large pharmaceutical companies that were buying ads to market HIV medications, a lot of them cut back. But they're coming back. I think when you're a larger company, you have the ability to withstand those blows a little more than smaller papers. I haven't seen many papers go under during this particular slump, but I know a lot of them are hurting.
What's the breakdown of your advertising in terms of gay and straight businesses?
It's about 70-30 straight. And that was the big leap that the gay press did back in the late 80s, early 90s, that really made it viable economically. They started saying, "Wait a minute, we don't have to just have gay bars and businesses, we can go out and get mainstream businesses that know they have a large gay customer base and get them to buy ads too."
Gay media seems to be all about fragmenting into niche publications. In this city, you've got the Blade, LGNY, Next, HX, Metro Source, Empire. Nationally, there's Instinct, Genre, HERO, The Advocate, Out and Girlfriends. Is that good in the long term?
I think that niche publications are generally good, because when you pick up a publication you know what you're getting. The downside of niche publications is there's a lot of stuff that you might be interested in learning that you won't happen across if you're only picking things that just apply to your narrow taste. Which is one of the great things about newspapers like the Blade. Even if you're picking it up for the theater reviews, you're going to see news stories, and so you may well come across some news stories that interest you as well.
I wanted to ask about the slogan on your masthead, "All the news for your life. And your style."
We brought that slogan in when we bought the papers. Where it comes from is, the Times has "All the news that's fit to print" as their slogan. We thought it was a nice way of saying?you know, people say homosexuality is a lifestyle, and we say, no, it's not a lifestyle. But, we thought coining that phrase?"all the news for your life" says we cover hard news. And "your style" says we have the other stuff, too. It's a way of doing that and also a play off The New York Times.
What plans do you have to acquire other papers?
I think right now we're consolidating what we have and making sure we're running what we have well and serving the communities we're in. But we're growing a newspaper group, and we'll do more acquisitions down the road. The idea is, every place we go into, we help create a better newspaper there, by putting more resources behind it and sharing content. We have 20 or so journalists working at our company. We have the ability to cover stories in a way that no gay media company's ever had. And that only gets better the more publications we have.
How has your upbringing affected your career as a journalist?
My main motivation is what happened to me as a kid growing up. I had a great family, but I also came out in my late 20s, partially because I was in such a conservative Christian family?I saw homosexuality as wrong and I prayed to God that I would change. I mean, to this day?I've been in a relationship for seven and a half years, my parents have never met my partner. They haven't called my house in seven and a half years, because they're afraid he'll answer the phone. So all my parents do when I go to their house is ask me about my dogs, because it's the only safe subject we have. It motivates me to change society so that kids who grow up struggling with sexuality don't have to go through what a lot of us went through. Because I think that the press is often the engine behind social change. To me, the big side benefit of what we do, through journalism, is help create the social change that'll make life better for people who grow up in conservative families.
I wanted to discuss the latest battle between Andrew Sullivan and Michelangelo Signorile, but more importantly, the issues it brings up. What role does gay media play in outing? Like recently, Girlfriends had a headline that was something like "What Will Rosie Do Next?" Stuff like that, where there are always whisperings about certain public figures.
I agree that we ought to hold public figures up to the same standard we hold everyone else up to. It's perfectly fair to ask Rosie O'Donnell whether she's gay or not. People's sexual orientation is not a private fact?to me, if you're a public figure, knowing who your partner is is one of the basic things the press covers. We all know who Rudy Giuliani's wife is, and who his mistress is! So we should all know who Rosie O'Donnell's girlfriend is. You know, she made a coy reference to her during the Daytime Emmy awards. Well, enough with the coy references, the media ought to be able to report who her girlfriend is.
I'm all for those questions being put. But there's a privacy line between talking about someone's sexual orientation and snooping into whether someone has a personal ad on the Internet?whether or not you approve of what it's seeking. That to me is mean-spirited and an invasion of their personal privacy. I like Mike Signorile, and I think he does a lot of good work. And Andrew takes shots at people too; he's a big boy. But what standard does that set? I mean, [Signorile] was saying, "Sullivan's a hypocrite because he criticized Clinton for the Lewinsky affair." Well, does that mean that no one can get involved in a public discourse about sexual issues unless they come to the table without any sexual sins of their own? Is that the kind of people we want having that debate? I don't think so. To me, he really crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed, and I thought it was really unfortunate that he did.
But you ought to ask Rosie O'Donnell who her girlfriend is. Actually, when New York magazine did that "Gay Life" cover?
I was just going to mention that. It's striking that Maer Roshan had such a hard time with that cover because he couldn't get 13 or whatever people to show their faces?
In New York City! And a lot of the people he wanted on there are not even closeted. They just didn't want to be on a gay cover. Do you think if New York was doing something on the 15 most influential African-Americans in New York people would say, "Oh, you know, I don't..." It's crazy. And Rosie O'Donnell's people, after that article came out, said, "She's never been secretive about her sexuality," which is not true. And they still wouldn't confirm it. She's enormously influential in Middle America, where a lot of people's lives could be changed if she came out.
Something else that I notice about your southern papers is that there isn't a hesitation to be critical of aspects of gay culture when it's necessary.
Or at least have a debate about them. The thing that I'm probably the most proud of about the Southern Voice is that it's the town hall for Atlanta's gay community?when there's a topic of conversation in the gay community, it's taking place in the pages of the paper. And that is exactly the role I'd like the New York Blade News and the Washington Blade to play in their communities as well. I think having an editorial page and a bigger op-ed section will do that.
Will you make the trip up for Pride?
I don't know yet. I probably will come up here. I've been to Washington Pride, and I've obviously been to Atlanta Pride. So New York would be a new experience.