<em>The Source</em> Stops Accepting Lewd Advertising

One thing magazine advertising and hip-hop music have always had in common is skin -- images of models, usually women, in alluring poses and various states of undress. The Source, the hip-hop magazine, does not aim to do away with such images -- there is a lot of money in them -- but it wants to make the sex in its pages a lot less explicit.

To that end, the magazine announced recently that it would no longer take what the co-publisher, L. Londell McMillan, calls "booty ads," for pornographic films, pornographic Web sites or escort services. But those have been a mainstay for The Source -- more than half the ads in the magazine at times, he said.

The Source hopes to gain more than it loses by chasing mainstream advertisers that do not want their ads alongside the adults-only kind. That's a serious gamble at a time when magazines are struggling, unable to hold onto the ads they have.

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