AVN sold to Dunkin’ Donuts

Adult Video News Media Network, a series of adult industry trade publications and events known collectively as AVN, was sold yesterday to Dunkin’ Brands, the Canton, MA parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts.

“I’ve been looking to get out for so long,” said AVN co-founder Paul Fishbein, who in 1982 began writing a porn video newsletter in Philadelphia that eventually grew into a group of magazines, websites, and affiliated trade shows, as well as an annual awards ceremony known as “The Oscars of Porn.” “I would have sold it to anybody.”

Once the only source for adult industry news, AVN has in recent years suffered the rise of blogs and competing trade magazines, though it remained the largest adult industry employer next to Hustler and Playboy.

News of the sale came as a surprise to AVN’s staff, who arrived this morning at the company’s Chatsworth, CA headquarters to find the doors bolted. A note explaining the sudden loss of their jobs had been left with Jose Aguilar, driver of a breakfast truck that frequented the parking lot.

“The man gave me the picture with Jill Kelly in it from the lobby,” Aguilar said of Fishbein, who he said cleaned out the building personally at 5 a.m. “He always let me use the bathroom when I needed to.”

AVN and its assets and liabilities were purchased for $3 million in cash and creme filling, sources said, and its employees could be seen boarding a big yellow schoolbus for the drive to upstart competitor XBiz, where each would be given a job.

“We’ll hire anyone from AVN unless I have personally seen him murder somebody,” said XBiz president Alec Helmy. The Hollywood-based company immediately launched a side business called Women in Doughnuts before it could help itself.

AVN will be absorbed into Dunkin’ Brands immediately, said a company spokesman, and its resources will be “recalibrated to provide breaking coverage of doughnuts, doughnut technology, bevnaps, personalities in the doughnut community, and legal issues facing the doughnut industry.”

For this last goal AVN Senior Editor Mark Kernes was the lone employee retained.

Fishbein was characteristically reticent about his plans, declining to say if he would join Dunkin’ Brands in an advisory capacity. There are no Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Southern California.

“I’m not sure what I’ll do,” said Fishbein. “I might just hang out at Krispy Kreme in my spare time and try to dissuade people from going in.”

The AVN acquisition will be reflected in Dunkin’ Donuts’ branding by means of a new motto (“Good Fuckin’ Doughnuts”) and the renaming of the company’s Large Regular coffee to BBW.