Magazine Wants to Be the CNN of Online Adult News

Paul Fishbein used to think his biggest problems were government censors and anti-porn activists. Then he logged on to the Internet.

Fishbein is editor and publisher of the Van Nuys-based trade magazine Adult Video News, generally considered the authoritative guide to the $9-billion U.S. sex business.

For retailers, AVN offers sales charts and reviews of arcane titles such as “Kitty’s Kinky Kapers” and “Ben Dover’s Naughty British Babes.” For fans, it’s an authoritative--and sometimes painfully exhaustive--source of news, gossip and starlets’ cup sizes.

Fishbein, in fact, models his lucrative, ad-crammed monthly--which sometimes runs more than 300 pages and weighs two pounds--after entertainment trade magazines such as Billboard.

“In an industry that is not really that well-respected by the outside world,” he says, “we are really well-respected for being straight-up.”

But the adult entertainment business is changing, and Fishbein is racing to keep up. While sales and rentals of adult videos racked up $4.1 billion last year, purveyors are steadily migrating online, where adult-oriented sites offer everything from chat rooms to “live-action” cameras. So AVN is following them--and has run smack into Luke Ford, an eccentric and self-aggrandizing cyber gossip from Beverly Hills.

On his Web site, which is devoted to porn news, Ford has repeatedly attacked the magazine for ignoring conflicts of interest, coddling advertisers and downplaying major stories, such as an outbreak of HIV among performers last year--allegations that Fishbein vehemently denies.

The threat of legal action last month forced Ford to retract a few particularly damaging accusations--but not before he posted the entire demand letter from Fishbein’s attorney.

The spat has sealed Ford’s reputation as porn’s bete noire. “If this were a different age, I’d be in danger of having my legs broken,” he muses, referring to porn’s fabled mob ties.

In one sense, the feud is nothing new for the sex trade, whose profane, ill-tempered producers often make their Hollywood counterparts seem Churchillian in comparison.

But it also underscores the enormous sums of money at stake in adult entertainment, an oft-ignored “gray market” that supports hundreds of small businesses as well as larger public companies ranging from Playboy Enterprises to Metro Global Media.

AVN found a profitable niche covering the adult video scene, which has grown steadily in popularity since the early 1980s. Nearly 9,000 new hard-core titles flooded the market last year alone. And retailers insist that, despite the Internet, consumers will continue buying adult tapes and DVDs.

“It’s a growing business,” says Craig Kelly, chief operating officer at Video City, a Torrance-based chain of 140 stores, where adult films account for up to 20% of total sales. Kelly says some of his stores have special sections dedicated to films featured in AVN.

Yet since Internet Entertainment Group began marketing a now-notorious sex video with Pamela Anderson and husband Tommy Lee, adult Web sites have taken off. According to a recent survey by the British research firm Datamonitor, sex sites garnered 69% of the $1.4 billion in worldwide sales of Internet-based content in 1998.

Steve Orenstein, president of Wicked Pictures, a 6-year-old production company in Canoga Park, says he was recently chagrined when an electrician installing wiring in his house revealed he was operating two adult Web sites in his spare time.

“The Internet has made everyone go, ‘Oh, I could do that,’ ” Orenstein says.

Fishbein is now struggling to stay atop the flow of information within this rich but extremely fragmented business, which helps explain why the battle with Ford has become so contentious.

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Last month AVN launched a spinoff magazine aimed at Web masters of adult sites and retooled its own site as a “CNN-type” news service. Fishbein acknowledges it’s uncertain terrain.

When asked the number of adult-oriented Web sites, he shrugs and says, “There’s too many to count.”

The situation represents a sharp turnabout from the early 1980s, when Fishbein, then a full-time video store clerk, pioneered the notion of a trade magazine dedicated to the adult entertainment business. He and several classmates from Temple University in Philadelphia scraped together $900 to put out their first issue.

“I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the material,” he says during an interview in his plush, mood-lit office, where photos of pro wrestlers bedeck the walls. “What I was interested in was publishing.”

His timing proved propitious. Adult videos were splintering into dozens of genres and subgenres: interracial, gay and bisexual, S&M;, “gonzo.” Confused retailers with limited shelf space needed guidance in deciding which titles to stock.

“The market became glutted,” says Ron Jeremy, an actor who has appeared in hundreds of porn films and was hired by Fishbein as AVN’s first gossip columnist. “It was a perfect time for Paul’s magazine.”

When the Reagan administration’s Meese Commission on Pornography began pressuring leading video suppliers--some of whom ended up being indicted on federal and state obscenity charges--Fishbein became an industry spokesman and advocate, a role he has retained to this day.

“If [porn] starts to seem redundant, all you have to do is think about governments trying to legislate what you can and can’t read or watch,” he says. “It gets your energy level going, your blood going.”

AVN still offers retailers and distributors plenty of legal advice and trade analysis. The June issue includes a round-table discussion about videos aimed at black audiences and a news item about the lifting of an Alabama ban on sex toys. Circulation currently stands at about 45,000. Fishbein says ad pages are up 12% over last year, with total revenue of about $5.2 million.

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The company also is sponsoring the Adult Entertainment Expo, an industry trade show which runs through Saturday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The magazine’s prominence troubles some in the industry.

“When a trade magazine amasses as much power as AVN, it becomes an intrinsic part of the industry. And that bothers me,” says Rodger Jacobs, a screenwriter and journalist who has written for Larry Flynt Publications, whose Hustler Erotic Video Guide competes with AVN.

Luke Ford has amplified such concerns on his Web site, often without the benefit of fact-checking. The son of a Christian evangelist, the Australian-born gossip has used the Web site to detail his sexual exploits with porn stars and thoughts on Judaism, to which he has converted. While Ford praises Fishbein himself as “credible,” he has accused AVN staffers of, among other things, trying to quash his reporting about HIV in the porn industry and tailoring its annual awards show to suit big advertisers.

“The stuff I’ve written has really shaken them up over there,” says Ford, who admits to putting unverified items on his site. He adds: “So far AVN has been a failure on the Internet. They’ve spent a lot of money and it’s just been drubbed by Internet people and adult people.”

Fishbein calls the allegation of corruption “a flat-out lie” and says that AVN ended up correcting errors in Ford’s reporting about the HIV scandal. Although he says he briefly flirted with hiring Ford to do a gossip column on the AVN site, he now dismisses him as “an irresponsible journalist.”

“It’s sort of like we’re the establishment and Luke’s the rogue,” Fishbein says. “We will always have competitors. . . . I welcome anything like that as long as we’re on a fair playing field.”