(85) Gay Professionals. Professional Gays.

In 1983 I was active in the Gay / Lesbian Press Association. It was a trade group whose purpose was to promote professionalism in the profession of running a gay  newspaper. Such as the practice of sending a cartoonist a check when he mails you an invoice.

One other push for professionalism was to stress the importance of broadening a paper's advertising base. Many local papers were bar rags because the bars were the only source of advertising revenue, and the only point of distribution (on top of the cigarette machines --- remember cigarette machines?). As long as this is the case, your ads will be cheap and your level of journalism will be to run bar photos of last Saturday's party featuring your top-advertising bar owners posing with cute shirtless boys.

To be sure, bar rags still exist. But many newspapers and magazines did escape the bar ghetto and conduct actual journalism.

Only to die at the hands of the internet.