'Playboy' gets ready for a hip replacement

Nearing 50, Hugh Hefner's top-shelf titillater is feeling its age. Sonia Purnell thinks the new editor will have a hard time resuscitating it

Playboy, famous for its nude centrefolds and laborious interviews, will be celebrating its 50th birthday next year. And just like the hairy-chested, medallion-wearing, ageing would-be lotharios we imagine "reading" it each month, it is in urgent need of some, shall we say, refurbishment.

The magazine's owner and founder, the 76-year-old Viagra-popping Hugh Hefner, hopes an import from the British-led world of lads' mags will provide the magazine with its own much-needed injection of fertility magic. But James Kaminsky, hired last week from the American version of Maxim, will have his work cut out when he takes over as editor next month.

Despite a recent small rise in circulation, Playboy sells well under half the seven million copies a month of its Seventies heyday. Many newsagents here no longer bother to stock it, and Stateside, those that do, under pressure from the religious right, hide it under the counter. It is also banned from many US military bases, where it was once found in practically every bedside locker.

Its look, content and marketing have barely changed since the days of sideburns, crotch-hugging trousers (for men) and orange fake tans. But the world – reflected in sales of men's magazines – has moved on apace and even the lads' mag phenomenon of the 1990s now looks limp, at least in its birthplace market, Britain.

But US Maxim, where Kaminsky was number two, has performed extremely well and Playboy has suffered at its hands, as well as from the arrival of US versions of magazines such as FHM and Stuff. Twenty-something men on the other side of the Atlantic and their younger brothers are still excited by the beer, babes and laughs format of what Americans quaintly misname "laddie magazines".

It is the second time in only a few months that an iconic but fading American men's magazine has trawled the lads' mags for a new editor. In May, Ed Needham from the US version of FHM, America's fastest-growing men's magazine, was poached to run Rolling Stone. They can only hope things go better than on this side of the pond, where Loaded founder James Brown was ejected in a matter of weeks after he brought his brand of humour to the rather more staid GQ.

Kaminsky, an American and a cousin of the Hollywood producer Mel Brooks, identifies more humour as his recipe for revamping Playboy and attracting those hitherto elusive younger readers not yet in need of medical assistance while out on a date.

"I want to have one 'fall-down-laughing' story in each issue," says the 41-year-old, selected after a lengthy scouring of the world's editorial offices by the headhunter Howard Sloan Koller.

But Kaminsky also wants to keep the famous Playboy interview, now celebrating its 40th year, which has featured such luminaries as Richard Nixon and John Updike. "I don't subscribe to the notion that 18- to 34-year-olds don't read long-form journalism," he says, extolling the corporate line. "Playboy is the magazine that saved me from suburbia."

Any action Kaminsky takes will be restricted by the fact that, despite his age, Hefner still likes to "shape" his Playboy baby. And by the presence of the outgoing editor of 30 years, Arthur Kretchmer, who will be staying on throughout 2003 until the end of the 50th anniversary celebrations.

Playboy's publishers have made it clear that they do not want Kaminsky to be a radical reformer. "We're not looking for enormous change," says Michael Carr, president of Playboy's publishing group. "He'll be helping us to attract more personalities to the magazine [and] bring in a new angle on the photographics, but again evolutionary rather than radical change. He'll bring in some humour but not too much. We have no desire to edit down to Maxim's level. We won't pick up the lad formula at all."

Kaminsky, who was a senior editor at Condé Nast's now-defunct Sports for Women, has yet another challenge awaiting him: finding a purpose for Playboy. Soft-focus part-nudity, on which it once had a virtual monopoly, is on offer pretty much everywhere these days, from the lads' mags' sexy starlets to the posh totty in the upmarket glossies. Camilla Parker Bowles' niece, Emma, has posed naked for a raunchy photo shoot in the latest edition of Tatler, while back in March, Kinvara Balfour, a direct descendant of former British PM Lord Salisbury, was pictured sprawling seductively across six pages of GQ.

"Playboy is just off the radar screen as far as advertisers are concerned," says Andy Martin of media buyer Media Edge. "It hails from 30 years ago, and if you want tits and bums you go to a mag like FHM, where they're done in a modern way to appeal to an affluent and sophisticated audience."

The financial distress of Penthouse provides a salutary lesson. Desperate to attract readers, the magazine has carried harder and harder-core porn and, according to one critic, now purveys such "raw and unappealing trash that no one wants anything to do with it". Its erroneous claim that 10 pages of photographs of a topless woman on a Florida beach showed the Russian tennis babe Anna Kournikova was perhaps symptomatic of its downward spiral.

Of course, there will always be a market, and a thriving one at that, for the full monty. But hard-core porn is now widely available on the internet in quantities that even Penthouse cannot provide. With sites like the Amsterdam-based Interclimax offering virtual brothels on the net, there is little that the magazines can do to compete in the "skin trade".

Sensing the way the market is going, Playboy's parent company has struck a deal with phone operators Hutchison and Virgin to provide soft-porn content for mobiles, aiming for a piece of a business expected to be worth $4bn a year by 2006.

Sex still sells. But will the porn industry's most famous brand still have a piece of the action?