• Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, February 20, 2013 3:52 PM

For magazine publishers, being an iconic brand "is not a business model,"  notes Jeff Bercovici in Forbes. "To judge from the body count in recent years, 'iconic' is more nearly a synonym for 'screwed,'” he notes, citing the recent bad news for such magazines as Reader's Digest, which just filed for bankruptcy.  "As with ships, the bigger a brand gets, the more time-consuming and expensive it becomes to change course, and the less willing anyone is to shoulder the responsibility for steering a new one."

Meanwhile, the iconic Playboy is trying to steer a new course, one where it's attempting to morph "into a licensing company—in the process shedding the seedier aspects of its image," writes Keach Hagey. "It remains a work in progress,"Hagey notes in his description of the magazine's current strategy.

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