Playboy magazine announced yesterday that its current issue will be its last.
A new Playboy magazine is being published this week — both on newsstands and as a digital download — and it will be the last one this year.
In a lengthy letter posted Wednesday on the blog platform Medium by Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, he details the decision and outlines his plans for the iconic publication moving forward. It remains unclear if the magazine will ever return to newsstands.
It’s a sign of the times, I suppose, that the risqué monthly magazine of the 1950’s has degenerated into a boring quarterly in the Internet era.
Famous for the playmates, the magazine never quite got the recognition it deserved for its journalism and its interviews. I have in a box somewhere the 1963 issue featuring the Bertrand Russell interview.
Basically, Hefner used the pictures of naked women to enable him to earn money producing the content that actually interested him. It wasn’t Playboy that signaled decadence; it’s that Playboy’s often very smart content couldn’t have been published without the playmates.