• Business Insider, Wednesday, December 21, 2011 2:06 PM

Playboy’s ad pages for the January/February 2012 issue shot up 55% to 49.2 pages over the previous year thanks to Lindsay Lohan gracing both the cover and an interior spread, but Jim Edwards writes that such celebrity-driven spikes won’t save the magazine in the long run.  Playboy’s print circulation is in “free fall,” he writes. 

But even with the current rate base of 1.5 million rate, it “ought to be able to sell a lot more than 50 pages of advertising.” The central problem? “Founder Hugh Hefner, who should have retired gracefully long ago” and who is "increasingly out of step with the world of new media.”

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