Oregon’s PQ Monthly shuns print, goes digital
by Fred Kuhr
Portland, Oregon’s PQ Monthly, as well as its sister publications El Hispanic News and Tankside, have ceased publishing print editions and are now “100% digital,” publisher Melanie Davis announced in a letter to readers earlier this month.
She said going all digital will allow her publications to get away from a print business model that she calls “oppressive.”
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| PQ’s Melanie Davis |
“Gone are the days of the industry telling us what size and format to print, or dictating to us when they can print our publications, forcing us to revolve around seemingly arbitrary deadlines,” wrote Davis. “… I have served this industry for 32 years collectively, and am done with the system preying on our community’s voices by economically choking us and weighing us down with capitalist censorship. We will no longer subscribe to that oppressive business system. Rather than being broken by that system, we are creating a better one.”
Davis started with local bilingual publication El Hispanic News as a sales representative in 1992. She purchased the publication in 2008. “That was the year the recession hit, and I am happy to say we proved publisher resilience by monetizing and automating online sales and by broadening our intersectional partnerships.” Those partnerships included publishing the “Official Pride Guide” for Pride NW, “making sure to include in our marketing budget funds to insert the Pride Guide into other racially diverse publications like The Asian Reporter and The Portland Observer.”
This led to the launch of PQ (which stands for Proud Queer) Monthly, a publication whose mission is to ensure “Every Letter & Every Color is Represented,” in 2012. She then launched Tankside, a mainstream motorcycle magazine. All of her publications are under her Brilliant Media LLC umbrella.
In addition to the news that the publications are going online only, Davis announced that Brilliant Media is in the process of publishing books on an annual basis that that will “reflect each media outlet’s best content. Each book published will have a revenue sharing model built into it that will directly benefit each contributor.”
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