This Site Has Not Been Sold

To set the rumor mill at ease mikesouth.com has not been sold.  It is true that I am close to retiring from it, it has not  been sold nor is it likely to be sold.  I have considered just turning it over to one or more of my writers nothing has been decided st this point, so stop bugging people about it…Thanks  South

 

143150cookie-checkThis Site Has Not Been Sold

This Site Has Not Been Sold

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9 Responses

  1. I think you should just close it when you retire. Its your name on the site and your legacy. I would close it.

  2. Mike’s not that stupid, Karma. I am surprised Kelli was, I wonder what caused her to sell anyway since she immediately started a new similar site (Naughty News Network). The money couldn’t have been enough to make it worth it to her, I think when Cindi was trying to sell it people estimated its value at about $5K. I would like this site to be preserved at IAFD if that is possible but I can’t speak to their ownership’s willingness to do so.

    Thank you for your service to the adult film industry over the years. I am sure it is much appreciated by many.

  3. That would suck if this became another incarnation of Luke’s sites when he sold them off long ago.

    I like the idea of you having a group of approved writers and allowing them to post (you should need to approve before it goes up though), and maybe you can pop in to say hello once in a while.

    I for one will be gone if this turns into another LIB type thing. That is just a headline site, with little thought or research put into it and is essentially useless.

  4. For what it’s worth, and I realize no one is asking, I’m facing a similar dilemma in that my wife and I have run a business together for nearly 33 years. Like many local businesses, it took a hit in the recession but it is still profitable. However, we’re both tired – I still have a full-time career and my wife would like to spend more time with family and friends. We contemplated selling the business, but after doing it for this long, neither of us have egos tied up in seeing it go on and the track record of selling businesses ain’t great. The new owners tend to just mess things up. So, in the spring, we’re calling it a day. My advice is that you do the same. Go out with your head held high.

  5. Mike: I wrote earlier about making the decision to close the business I run with me wife (truth be told, she does the heavy lifting) this spring after nearly 33 years. But really, that was my wife’s decision.

    That said, I made a decision very similar to yours at the end of 2012. I had been writing for the women’s magazine market in New York going back to 1986. Over the years, I’d written for basically all of the women’s books on the newsstand in your grocery store, including more than 20 years at Good Housekeeping. I also had regular gigs at Reader’s Digest, Prevention and the personal finance teams at CBS News and Yahoo Finance. I was one of those lucky freelancers who worked constantly. There were editors I’d had a relationship with for over 25 years.

    Then, it all changed. Really talented senior editors were either let go because they made a lot of money, or offered retirement packages. In one week, the whole personal finance editorial team was let go from CBS.

    In the fall of 2012, I went to NYC to schmooze. One of my stops was at Yahoo Finance. I was there in a blazer, dress slacks and a tie – in the old days, I would’ve been expected to wear a business suit – and everyone in the office was in hoodies and sketchers. I felt like Grandpa Jones chaperoning a high school prom. Went over to Good Housekeeping, where I still had a column for 20 years and learned that my editor was getting canned by the new editor in chief (a year later, the new editor in chief got canned).

    Like you running this site, I had a reputation. I could probably have kept going but in my gut, I knew that the gig was literally up. And, what had made it fun for 26 years was the relationships I’d built with really great editors who were calling it quits. I wrote one feature in 2013 for a close friend who was the editor in chief of Prevention, and then hung it up. It was one of the last articles she edited before she got fired.

    A part of my career had always been devoted to business writing, and by sheer coincidence, I was offered a very nice position with a publisher of business magazines and took it.

    I still get all of the women’s magazines. When I look at the mast heads, I don’t recognize a single name at any of the magazine I called home for almost three decades. I read the articles, and I no longer see a place for the kind of work that I was really good at. Meanwhile, at the age of 60, I’m doing some of the best and most satisfying work of my career and making as much, or more, money as I ever made. Walking away was the best decision I’ve ever made.

    So …. walk away. Go fishin’.

  6. BT That really encapsulates my feelingsto a T. The last time I went to adult Expo was in 2007, right before the spinal surgery. In 08 I still wasn’t recuperated enough to deal with the crowds, the long days on my feet and all so I skipped it, I looked at how much money I saved and ever since I haven’t been able to justify going back…I loved meeting the new people and hanging out with the old ones, they are pretty much all gone now, every year I think I will go back this year, then this year I realized that I won’t know much of anyone.The people I hung with the most…JimmyD, Anna Malle (RIP), Tim and Felicia, RobbyD, Harry Weiss, Steve Sideman, Donna and AAaron, Beater, Mark Nakamura, none of them go anymore. A few still do, Adella, Tod and some others but my understanding is that the show that was once industry only, is now nothing but a fanfest…I am afraid I would be disappointed and let down. That brings me full circle to mikesouth.com I don’t want it suffer the same fate. I have great memories of Adult expo going back to way before I was in the biz….I think I want them to stay exactly that, great memories. I think mikesouth.com should go that route.

    On a side note it’s always been strange to me that someone with your obvious literary expertise would find this site interesting, considering that I am such a hack, I tend to write as though I were telling it to you in person, I can tell a story OK I guess but when it comes to syntax, punctuation all all of that…well you get the idea…

  7. The answer to your question is pretty simple. I’ve been a long time fan of porn. Meanwhile, I like to understand how things that I am interested in work. When I read your site, and the same was true of Luke’s site when Luke ran it, I felt like I wasn’t reading industry PR. When talent posted, you had a sense that you were hearing from them talking about their lives (think Julie, for instance) and not some writing for them about how much they liked being slapped, punched and spit on.

    I’ll miss that.

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