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| COLUMBIA HOUSE
PLANS PORN CLUB
By JOHN MOTAVALLI
Penny for your (dirty) thoughts?
Columbia House, famous for its "12 CDs for a penny" record clubs, will launch its own adult video club with Playboy Entertainment at the end of this month. The service, called Hush, will sell pornography through direct mail and a Web site.
While 50-year-old Columbia House is eager to cash in on the $12 billion porn business, officials are pretty hush hush about Hush.
"This will be a separate subsidiary," said Jim Litwak, senior vice president of marketing at Columbia House. "It will be completely separate from Columbia House, and will not be marketed to current members. We are not using Columbia House at all, and are not talking to existing members; this is a separate business and deal."
Columbia House, the nation's largest direct distributor of DVDs and home video, will handle distribution, while Playboy, which has an adult direct-mail list "in the millions," according to Litwak, will handle marketing.
Litwak added that his company estimates that total adult video sell-through and rentals total $5 billion a year.
He said Hush can grab a significant amount of the marketplace because of Playboy's wide reach and Columbia's direct distribution methods. The club would work similarly to the company's record groups — subscribers would select from a monthly catalog of titles.
Executives from Columbia House were roaming the aisles of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last week, meeting with producers and stressing that Hush will distribute adult content from other publishers besides Playboy.
Hush also insisted that it is starting with no members and is not piggybacking on existing Columbia House subscribers. In the words of one company executive, it will be a "slow build."
Last June, Columbia House struck a quiet deal with Playboy to add about 150 of its more "tasteful" product line to the Columbia House DVD Club, and it has also been test marketing adult titles through its Canadian subsidiary. Litwak said very few club members have complained.
But considering the outcry over Janet Jackson and Nicolette Sheridan, Columbia House needs to tread carefully, said entertainment analyst Dennis McAlpine of McAlpine Associates.
"Columbia House might bring in some negatives because of the association," he said. "It's more risky for Columbia House than for Playboy."
It may be risky not to get into the flesh business, however.
Traditional discount-book and record clubs like Columbia House and Time Warner's Book of the Month Club, which once enjoyed huge market shares, have been hard hit by the introduction of discount Internet distributors, such as Amazon.com, and eBay. Adult entertainment, meanwhile, has grown exponentially.
Among the recipients of Hush marketing dollars, Litwak said, will be Howard Stern, with Hush spon soring contests on Stern's syndi cated radio show. Hush will also be promoted through direct mail and through ads in adult magazines, Litwak added.
Columbia House was launched in 1955. It has over 8.5 million offline and online club members in the United States and Canada who pick from some 5,000 DVDs and 9,000 music titles through its various entertainment clubs.
In 2002, the company was purchased by merchant banker Blackstone Capital Partners, with former operating partners Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music still owning minority stakes.
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| The snags in N.Y.C. politics going national
What once worked for Giuliani and Kerik raises eyebrows in Washington.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
NEW YORK - So what if Bernard Kerik had a personal relationship with a company believed to be connected to the Gambino mob family?
Or that he hired a foreign nanny and didn't bother to check her immigration status or pay her taxes?
And is it a problem that once a New Jersey judge issued an arrest warrant for the guy for failing to pay his debts?
Hey, this is New York, the historic home of Tammany Hall and William "Boss" Tweed. This is a City of Sin that doesn't sleep at night, an island unto itself full of foreigners and freethinkers. Or at least, so go the myths.
It's unclear how many of these skeletons were known before Mr. Kerik became the city's top cop in 2000. But once they began emerging on the national stage after President Bush nominated him to be secretary of Homeland Security, Kerik's budding national career suddenly and unceremoniously imploded. And it may be likewise for the national political prospects of his mentor and current partner, Rudolph Giuliani, many pundits believe.
"This is more than a black eye for Giuliani. It's a broken arm, and it's going to take a while time to mend," says Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "It's a real window into his administration and some of his associates. The amount of sleaze is just stunning."
Some national observers contend the Kerik debacle is yet another sign that New York City, still somewhat suspect in the "Bible Belt" despite the goodwill generated by Sept. 11, is not a fit breeding ground for the nation's leaders. No New Yorker has sat in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And he was from upstate. Indeed, no New York City mayor has ever moved on to lead the nation from the Oval Office. And that, says Kathleen Hulser of the New-York Historical Society, is not surprising because the city tends to be ahead of the national curve.
"New York is a place that prides itself on recklessly trying on new ideas all of the time. It has for a good deal of the nation's history prospered as a port and a crossroads of commerce because new ideas are constantly being injected," she says. "But it suffers in national politics from that very openness to change, because it changes too fast for the national electorate."
So Mr. Giuliani's roots are the first strike against him in any national race. And Kerik's problems aside, there is the simple but undeniable fact of who Giuliani is: "How does a pro-choice, Northeastern, antigun, environmentalist, pro-gay former mayor of New York who once endorsed Mario Cuomo win the Republican nomination?" asks Joseph Mercurio, a New York political consultant. "It just doesn't make any sense to me. I'd find it astonishing if he went that route."
For other New Yorkers, Kerik's emerging affairs (literally, the married father is now reported to have had two mistresses simultaneously while he was the city's top cop) and Giuliani's questionable judgment are just a reminder that before Sept. 11, New Yorkers had had about enough of them. Kerik had come under fire for using local cops to help research his book - the publisher of which is one of his alleged affairees - as well as for providing police protection to the then-married mayor's girlfriend at a cost of $200,000 a year. One local columnist called him "Giuliani's water boy." And the mayor's popularity had also waned considerably,both because of his very public adulterous affair in Gracie Mansion and because he usually did pretty much what he wanted, spawning a variety of lawsuits the city often lost.
"Giuliani was finished in New York until 9/11, when he became St. Rudy," says former Mayor Edward Koch. "So far as I know the only people who have a permanent character change are saints, real saints."
But Giuliani's boosters and some political analysts maintain that the man who came to be known as America's mayor with the dust from Sept. 11 still on his shoes will emerge from this latest scandal. In part, because New Yorkers have learned long ago never to count him out. "Here was a guy whose political future was nil in the spring and summer of 2000, and then events made him," says pollster John Zogby. "This doesn't help. Certainly in the short run, it's going to burst the bubble."
But Mr. Zogby notes the next election is three years and 11 months away, and Giuliani "does have the ability to rise above some of the seamier things that have happened."
As Professor Sabato notes, every election comes with surprises. "I mean, whoever thought a governor from Arkansas would ever become president?"
And as for whether New York is any more corrupt than other cities, historians say that's not the case. "Given the size of the government, it's been relatively clean compared to other cities," says New York historian Kenneth Jackson.
Although, it may be more tolerant of politicians and their various peccadilloes. "The big-city atmosphere is one that attracts people that can succeed in a competitive arena, and it takes a lot of libido to succeed," says Ms. Hulser.
"There's seems to be more understanding of that here."
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