Revised Ms. to Publish, but Without Ads : Media: To be free of advertiser control over editorial content, the magazine will be reader supported at a price of $40 a year.

For 17 years, advertisers turned their backs on Ms.; now the feminist magazine is returning the favor.

In late June, Lang Communications will launch a revised, advertisement-free version of the journal called Ms.: the World of Women, company officials said. A direct-mail blitz targeting 580,000 prospective readers around the nation begins today.

“It will be entirely reader supported,” said Gloria Steinem, a founder of the original Ms. and a consulting editor at the new magazine. “It may not work, you know. It’s a very risky experiment.”

Risky, because American readers are not used to spending $40 a year for just six issues of a magazine, said Steinem, who will take on the advertising industry in the periodical’s premier issue with a piece called “Sex, Lies and Advertising.”

“Ms. always flouted the rules of the ad world that say, especially for products directed at women, that the ad must be connected to the editorial,” Steinem said. “You don’t have food ads unless you have recipes. You don’t get clothing ads unless you have lavish fashion coverage. We never did that; every other women’s magazine does.”

While industry experts wished the new publication luck, they also pointed out the dangers ahead.

“I certainly wonder how they will solve the problem of reaching a younger generation of women for whom feminism is a bad or irrelevant word,” said Judith Daniels, a magazine consultant and contributing editor at Glamour magazine. “And the economics of our business is that we’re dependent on advertising.”

Without ads, circulation has to be massive, Daniels said. That kind of circulation does not come cheap and is the product of costly promotion and publicity. Direct mail is expensive, particularly if you’re trying to target the prospective Ms. reader.

“Feminism is a state of mind, not a conventional demographic,” Daniels said. “They don’t show up in a tidy way on mailing lists. They’re a tough group to locate.”

Ms. plans to spend $300,000 on its initial direct-mail campaign, said Andrea Kaplan, spokeswoman for Lang Communications. And she argued that the new publication won’t need the kind of circulation that the old magazine had when it suspended publication in December.

“We had 550,000 at time of suspension,” Kaplan said. “They were overspending on the circulation to get it to a point where advertisers would buy. (For the new journal) we need between 50,000 and 100,000.”

Ms. was founded in 1972 by a group of women activists that included Steinem. Eight years later, it acquired nonprofit status as part of the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communications.

In 1987, John Fairfax Ltd., an Australia-based media company, bought the magazine from the foundation.

After one year under Fairfax, two Australian journalists organized a management buyout of Ms., created Matilda Publications and launched a teen magazine called Sassy. Last October, Lang Communications bought the two magazines and stopped the presses at Ms.

“Had we published in December and January, we would have lost $150,000 an issue,” Kaplan said. “I think it was smart to rethink and relaunch Ms. rather than keep publishing an ailing magazine that would have just died a natural death.”

Consumer Reports is one of the few general-audience magazines that stays afloat without advertising. But Ken Noble, a media analyst for Paine Webber Inc., said that it is possible for Ms . to manage, too.

“It’s an interesting concept,” Noble said. “If the price is high enough and the cost of soliciting subscriptions and editorial costs are low enough, you can do it. It’s a function of revenues less costs. . . . It isn’t something that I’d care to do, but it can be done.”

Steinem contended that breaking away from the yoke of the advertising world will allow the magazine to be more brash and more interesting and to woo back readers who fell away when the the original Ms. fell victim to the whims of advertisers.