Penthouse bankruptcy looms

Thirty seven years after it was launched in London as a raunchy competitor to Playboy, Penthouse magazine's survival is up in the air.

The rapid spread of internet porn and of porn movies on video and DVD have sent the magazine's circulation into a tailspin, from five million copies a month at its peak to just 650,000.

General Media, the owner of the magazine, is $52m (£36.23m) in the red.

And with interest repayments of almost 13m this year, the company is finding it hard to repay its debts.

In an interview with the New York Times, the publisher of Penthouse, Bob Guccione, lamented recent developments.

"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," he said, insisting that there is no future for magazines such as Penthouse.

"I'm delighted that Mr Guccione may be going out of business. The problem is that he is being replaced, quite possibly, by something that is much worse," said anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin.