New Owners of The Advocate and Out Magazine Plan Ambitious Expansion: ‘We Are Definitely In Growth Mode’

It’s been more than six months since Pride Media, the parent company of several pivotal LGBTQ+ publications including Out Magazine and The Advocate, was acquired by Equal Entertainment Inc., the owner of the Celebrity Page brand.

The acquisition, formally announced on June 21, resulted in the creation of Equal Pride. It is run under the primary ownership of Mark Berryhill and Michael Kelley along with, as Berryhill explained in an interview with Mediaite, “a team of both LGBTQ community members and allies.”

The move, kicking off a new chapter in the turbulent history of Out and The Advocate, meant the magazines came under their fifth owners since they were first combined in 2000. It also meant they were finally returned to ownership by members of the LGBTQ+ community.

While Berryhill, who serves as CEO of the combined company, is optimistic about the new era Equal Pride is about to embark on, the fates of The Advocate and Out have been up in the air in recent years.

Besides constantly changing hands, owners have been embroiled in controversy after controversy, from issues with paying employees and contractors to regular tabloid coverage of actions by employees or owners themselves. The former owner of The Advocate and Out made headlines repeatedly for donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians.

Thus far, the new company has remained under the radar. Outside of Page Six reporting that Michael Kelley missed the company’s Out100 festivities with monkeypox, Equal Pride has largely avoided any headlines.

A series of notable changes have taken place since the merger. Diane Anderson-Minshall, who was CEO of Pride Media, stayed on and became president and global chief content officer at Equal Pride after the merger, and said in a statement at the time of the announcement that “We could not be more excited about the opportunity to join forces with Equal.”

At least for Anderson-Minshall, the excitement didn’t last long. She left the company last month, after working at Pride Media publications since 2011. She confirmed her departure in social media posts praising the last covers of The Advocate under her leadership: a double cover issue with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and actor Harvey Guillen.

Mediaite reached out to Anderson-Minshall for comment on the circumstances of her ouster. She replied by saying simply: “the new owners of the company and I wanted to go in different directions.”

Judy Wieder, who previously served as the first female editor in chief of The Advocate and woman editorial director of The Advocate, Out, The OutTraveler, HIVPlus, and Alyson magazines, in addition to Advocate Books, spoke to Mediaite about the importance about the publications and their role in the LGBTQ communities.

“When I first walked into The Advocate offices, there were hardly any women working there—in fact I was one of maybe two,” Wieder said. “And while the men staffers were plentiful enough one week, they often didn’t show up the following week. Too many were ill with HIV, either receiving whatever meager treatments were available, or dying. These were the most tragic days in queer history, framed by a terrified and unresponsive public.”

“But sometimes calamitous circumstances give rise to destiny and purpose,” she said. “And in the late 80s and 1990s, The Advocate was cursed and blessed with a purpose few magazines have ever had.”

“In most societies, if you are a minority because of your skin color, religion, or nationality, you usually know others like you—probably family members. If you are queer, you had no such experience,” she said. “Every other person in your family wasn’t gay. In fact, your blood families often rejected you. But you could read The Advocate!”

At the time, The Advocate’s objective was “persuading gay people to come out,” Wieder explained, because “back then, you generally found out someone was queer because they were outed. If they were celebrities, they were outed in the tabloids.”

While now that sounds dated, Wieder argued it was a necessary step towards change.

“You can’t get to today without passing yesterday,” she said. “As long as the public was allowed to believe they didn’t know anyone gay, nothing changed.”

Wieder still sees The Advocate and Out as publications of vital importance to the community at a time when LGBTQ rights remain precarious across the United States and are still far from established in much of the world.

“It was an old formula with a nice twist,” she recalled. “Audiences love celebrities. Advertisers use them to sell products. The Advocate and Out used them to sell LGBTQ rights to a homophobic world that so desperately needed to be educated. And, I will be forever grateful to every single TV, film, music, science, and political star (and their publicists) who didn’t slam the phone down on me when I called.”

She credits the magazines’ coverage of those celebrities — Ellen DeGeneres, George Michael, Barney Frank, and Rosie O’Donnell chief among them — for “giving stardom a good name.”

The merger between Pride Media and Equal Entertainment was years in the making.

Berryhill, who now serves as CEO of the new company, told Mediaite, “We have been looking at Pride Media for several years, and so when it became available to acquire the assets, and to take these brands to the next level, we were very excited to see how we could do that.”

“We believe very strongly in these brands and we believe returning them to the queer community is very important for several reasons,” he continued, explaining that doing has been “embraced pretty strongly” by both employees of the new company and the community itself.

In August, after the syndicated Celebrity Page show came to an end after eight seasons, the brand officially merged with Equal Pride. The next month, Equal Pride launched The Advocate Channel, described as “a multi-use 24/7 digital network dedicated to creating equality.”

“Video is one of, if not the most important component of our strategy and in the future,” Berryhill told Mediaite. “We will continue to be in a digital-first world for consumers. We started with a small amount of people [in video] and it’s progressed, so we’ve hired eight to ten people alone just in the video department. It’s a very important strategy.”

He added: “Soon we’ll be announcing or distributing plans through other channels, but The Advocate Channel gets us into a new world. And besides queer, we’re focused on people of color, women, and other underserved minority groups, so our motto is advocating. And you know, we plan to do that by telling really interesting and important stories.”

Berryhill isn’t just betting on video as the future of the Equal Pride brand.

“In the last three months, I believe that we added between 15 and 20 folks, many of them full-time, some part-time and freelancers, in all aspects: sales, marketing, journalism, video, CMO, PR department, so forth,” he said. “We’re definitely in growth mode right now.”

Berryhill acknowledged that while Equal Pride’s stable of brands are storied, a key challenge will be convincing younger generations to read or watch.

“We’re big believers of research,” he said, explaining the company will be embracing “focus groups and other research to really find out what the queer community wants, from coverage and all the print aspects to online to new social media like TikTok.”

Berryhill avoided criticizing past owners of the brands he now oversees, but did say he believed there has been a lack of effort to understand what younger readers want.

“I think in the past, there has not been a lot of research done, and I’m very big on research and talking to the consumer,” he said. “So while we know these brands are extremely well known with many in the community, and very well respected, we also know there’s a whole new generation that is not aware of it. And we have to find ways to go to them, reach them, and let them get excited, just like we are, and explain the history.”

He highlighted Pride specifically as a site that will cater to younger audiences.

“We really focused pride.com to skew a little bit younger and a little bit more with music and a little bit of politics and lifestyle,” he said. “We really want that to be the site that younger queer people who are discovering LGBTQ media come to.”

While The Advocate and Out started as magazines, they no longer rely heavily on print for revenue. That said, Berryhill insisted multiple times “we still believe in print very strongly.”

Besides shepherding Celebrity Page, Berryhill brings over 30 years of experience directly in journalism to the table. He was previously news director at multiple local TV stations and served seven years as a vice president at the video division of Meredith Corporation. For that reason, he’s confident he can oversee the publications with more involvement and intention than others may have.

“I don’t know if we can ever become the size of Condé Nast or Meredith — or that we need to,” Berryhill said. “I will tell you that… we are in acquiring mode. We do plan to add other assets.”

“We want to buy to grow our company,” he said.