Out Magazine, attorney sold to new owners in Pride Media Acquisition –

Pride Media, Home out of the magazine, attorney And Pride.com, acquired by Equal Entertainment, and will be renamed Equal Pride.

The acquisition includes all available assets, including digital weapons. Outside s attorney, magazine flyer s beyond the magazine And returns the nation’s largest LGBTQ-owned media, digital, television and entertainment company to majority ownership by LGBTQ+.

Mark Berhill will be the CEO of Equal Pride, Michael Kelly, chairman and president of Global Growth and Development, who will report to Berryhill. Diane Anderson-Minshall, Pride Media’s first CEO, intends to maintain her C-suite responsibility as Global and Development Director, focusing her work on publishing brands and expanding her international audience. Joe Lovejoi has been named CFO since joining Stuart Brockington as Executive Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.

Kelly and Berihill are life and business partners with experience in the media industry. At Equal Entertainment, which specializes in everyday television, celebrity documentary series and branded content, Kelly came from PwC, where he ran an entertainment company that created Hulu and, initially, AT&T’s promotional offerings. Berihil served as Meredith’s director of news and marketing before becoming a programmer and creative director.

The acquisition comes four years after Adam Levine, CEO of Los Angeles-based investment firm Orevea, acquired Pride Media in 2017 through a management-backed buyout of Here Publishing. In 2018, Pride Media A new era began, during which then CEO Nathan Coyle hired Philip Picard, known for launching Conde Nast’s. They – which Outside Editor-in-Chief and Zack Stafford, weird loop Co-producer, former CCO of Grindr and editor-in-chief of the app’s digital magazine I enter – As editor-in-chief attorney.

In December 2019, Coyle, Picard and Stafford, who also made history as Attorney ‘First Black Editor-in-Chief – Resigns or resigns as a staff member, reported later უ New York Times. This was preceded by 42 part-time employees posting an open letter requesting that Pride Media be reimbursed for work done by them. (In the same year, a full pay cut was imposed and tensions over wages at Pride Media’s offices led to the suspension of work.)

Noil issued a response to the promised payment, while pointing to the company’s complex corporate ownership network. At the same time, the company was facing public backlash over Levin’s political donations when Capital Firm’s CEO discovered that he had donated to anti-LGBTQ Republican politicians after promising to stop. LGBTQ nation.

Despite the magazine’s recent rock history, Kelly and Berhill see the acquisition of Pride Media as an important step towards expanding the brand, confirming current audiences and attracting new audiences.

“Now we not only have an amazing American story, but we also have an LGBTQ story and 55 years of media following the growth of equality from Stonewall to this day. “You can imagine the rich stories we have,” Kelly said. THR. “We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to bring these leading voices for the LGBTQ+ community into our portfolio, and we can really start to grow and focus on them at the most important moment, so to speak, in our country’s history. ”

Plans are to expand existing businesses, print with constant dedication, 55 years of payback attorney The brand is “at the root of news, politics and entertainment, delivered through the lens of equality,” Kelly said. Nonetheless, Outside It will have a lifestyle focused focus on both the experiences of gay men and a wider audience of women and people of color. Kelly said the first marketing campaign for historic brands is to encourage subscribers to forward readings to local youth centers, LGBTQ centers, churches and affiliated schools.

As for Pride.com, which Kelly says is “arguably the most valuable URL in all of LGBTQ media,” Equal Pride “seems serious” about engaging with the LGBTQI community and advertisers to find out what they want. Initial interest suggests focusing on Pride festivals, Pride stories, performance stories, music festivals featuring masons and artists, and the NFT Stonewall Artists Forum “so Stonewall artists everywhere can sell their work both virtually and physically.

In addition, the company is trying to significantly expand the brand’s content through videos and social media. “Have we seen how to take a brand that no one has heard of and introduce it to them? It’s very clear that right now we have a great way to do that in video and social media: taking care of our customers who have been with us and introducing a new generation to stoneware media.

At the moment, Equal Pride will not expand overly redundant content from the original script, Kelly said. But it showed that in addition to its expansion proud today The video shows in addition to its current five-minute performance as the team grows, OTT content will be another way to bring the company’s “progressive media voice” to its inclusive audience of women, people of color and LGBTQ viewers. + in a pop. culture, lifestyle and fashion. Biased news content.

Bringing that work to international markets, “especially in markets where LGBTQ rights are so oppressed and repressed,” Kelly said, is also on the table. The duo says the company, whose expansion plans aim to cater to a wide range of LGBTQ+ audiences, already has advertisers such as General Motors, Google Pixel, Gilead, Capital One, Disney/Hulu, TikTok, McDonald’s, Molson Coors, NBCU. . And J&J, on the 2022 client list.

At a higher staffing level, the plans are not to downsize, but to significantly increase, Kelly said. THR Equal Pride has already hired a new marketing director, a new video supervisor and a new editor. “We protect every person. “We actually have a process,” he said. “We need stronger journalists. We need more people to help us on the brand side of marketing. Let’s go to the video. We created the entire newsroom and content studio for these brands.”

The president of Equal Pride also noted that the company is trying to create an alumni association that includes employees who have worked with brands from an early age. “We want to stay in touch with the people who created these brands, who created the stories, because we are the most vulnerable in the job market and it’s important for us to help even when they leave us and keep that story alive. “Stay healthy.”

“It will take time. “That will take discipline,” she added. “It will take a long time to think, but we know we can do it.”