Soon "I read it for the articles" will be more believable. 
 
 The iconic men's magazine Playboy says it is planning to drop fully nude female photography from its pages. 
 
 In a letter to readers, the magazine predicted that everyone would be asking why, so it answered, "Playboy has been a friend to nudity, and nudity has been a friend to Playboy, for decades. The short answer is: times change." 
 
 Like so many other magazines, Playboy is reacting to the Internet revolution. In Playboy's case, it is about the ubiquity of online pornography. 
 
 "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. It's just passé at this juncture," Playboy's chief executive Scott Flanders told The New York Times, which first reported the news on Monday night. 
 
 His comments sent shock waves through the magazine industry. Playboy, founded by Hugh Hefner, has been a controversial part of American popular culture since its debut in 1953. 
 
 "Yes, we're taking a risk by going non-nude," the magazine said, "but this is a company—like all great companies—that has risk in its DNA." 
 
 Playboy has a circulation of around 800,000 -- way down from its pre-Internet glory days when it boasted a circulation of many millions. 
 
 Related: Why is Playboy giving up nudity? 
 
 By covering up the nude photos, the magazine hopes to appeal to a broader and younger audience both in print and online. 
 
 The change will take effect in February when Playboy publishes its March issue. 
 
 But the magazine will continue to show women in what it calls provocative poses -- like Maxim, Esquire, GQ and other publications. 
 
 Another competitor is Vice, an outlet that began as a print magazine and has evolved into a multimedia juggernaut valued at more than $2 billion. Both Playboy and Vice target young men living in urban areas. "The difference between us and Vice," Flanders told the Times, "is that we're going after the guy with a job." 
 
 Samir Husni, the director of Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, said that the magazine's attempts at a younger audience may alienate the magazine's long-time subscriber base. 
 
 "They want the young college male, but that young college male doesn't need playboy," Husni said. "With this announcement they may have lost the audience they had and may never get the audience they want." 
 
 After the announcement on Monday night, commenters on social media pointed out that the removal of nude photos may boost the magazine's articles. 
 
 "The Playboy Interview has long been one of the greatest columns in the magazine world," Politico media reporter Alex Weprin tweeted. "In some ways the rest of the magazine held it back." 
 
 Husni added that Playboy was "the original man's magazine that serviced men through advice and helpful information" while also dealing with the nude photography. 
 
 "In the past, it went through the hoops of the nude photos to offer help to men in all aspects of life," Husni said. "But now, Playboy has lost its identity and is in many ways frozen in time." 
 
 The Future of Media, a customized magazine ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Playboy without nudity: Will anyone buy it for the articles? 
 
 Playboy magazine is to stop publishing images of naked women as part of its redesign, it has emerged. 
 
 Its US owners say the internet has made nudity outdated, and pornographic magazines are no longer so commercially viable, the New York Times reports. 
 
 Playboy's circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in the 1970s to the current 800,000, official figures show. 
 
 However, the magazine will still feature women in provocative poses - though not fully nude. 
 
 'Battle won' 
 
 The decision was apparently taken last month at a meeting attended by Playboy founder and current editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner. 
 
 Magazine executives admitted that Playboy - which was founded in 1953 - had been overtaken by the changes it pioneered, according to the New York Times. 
 
 "That battle has been fought and won," Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders is quoted as saying by the newspaper. 
 
 "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passe at this juncture." 
 
 Gone, too, are the days when interviews with figures of the stature of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Jimmy Carter made Playboy so culturally and politically significant, says the BBC's Nick Bryant in New York. 
 
 Playboy's website has already banished nudity, partly to give it access to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And its popularity has soared, with web traffic quadrupling. 
 
 A brand long synonymous with salaciousness is cleaning up its act, and all with the blessing - apparently - of the 89-year-old Mr Hefner, our correspondent adds. 
 
 Image copyright AFP/Getty 
 
 60 years of Playboy 
 
 Playboy's logo showing a rabbit head wearing a bow tie is one of the most recognisable in the world. The company makes most of its money from licensing it around the world to sell products including toiletries, drinks and jewellery, including a necklace worn by the character Carrie Bradshaw in the TV series Sex and the City. About 40% of merchandising income is generated in China, where the magazine itself is not available. 
 
 Among the magazine's most famous interviews was a 1976 conversation with Jimmy Carter in which the then presidential candidate admitted he had desired women other than his wife, confessing he had "looked on a lot of women with lust" and "committed adultery in my heart many times". Other notable interviewees included jazz musician Miles Davis in 1962; writer Vladimir Nabokov in 1964; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1981. 
 
 The Library of Congress in Washington produces a Braille version of Playboy, one of 30 general-interest magazines that are translated for the blind and visually-impaired. In 1985, Congress voted to stop producing a Braille Playboy over morality concerns and to save money. But a group of blind Playboy readers sued for their right to read the magazine and a judge ruled that the ban violated their First Amendment rights under the US constitution. The Braille version can be viewed here. 
 
 Playboy has gained a reputation for riffing off business stories, beginning with a "Women of Wall Street" series in 1989 featuring nine stock market workers - shortly afterwards, seven of the nine were revealed to have left their jobs. Playboy continued with "Women of Enron" and "Women of WorldCom" shoots after those companies collapsed. It revisited the "Women of Wall Street" theme as the global financial crisis hit in 2008. The magazine advertised for models, requiring them to have worked for a financial institution and expressing a preference for those with senior management experience. ||||| ENLARGE Playboy founder Hugh Hefner took the company private in 2011. Photo: Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images 
 
 Playboy Enterprises Inc. is exploring a sale, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that comes soon after the storied magazine publisher ditched nude photos and launched a revamp for the digital age. 
 
 Investment bank Moelis & Co. is advising Playboy, which Hugh Hefner, the company’s founder, took private in 2011 alongside private-equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management. Mr. Hefner owns a roughly one-third stake in the company, the people said. 
 
 Playboy is exploring a sale, and it could be valued at over $500 million. WSJ's Steven Perlberg joins Lee Hawkins to discuss. Photo: Playboy Enterprises 
 
 Playboy doesn’t disclose detailed financials. In 2015, the company generated $38 million from media, including the magazine and digital publishing initiatives, and $55 million from licensing its brand to other companies, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The licensing business could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the people familiar with the matter said. 
 
 Playboy could fetch north of $500 million, and potential buyers could include companies that would license the brand for use in consumer goods, new media outfits and trophy buyers, the people said. The 2011 deal that took Playboy private valued it at $207 million. The company owns other assets such as the 5-acre Playboy Mansion, a sprawling Los Angeles home that it recently put up for sale. As Playboy shopped the mansion, bidders for the whole company emerged, prompting the company to enlist Moelis to consider an all-out sale on a separate track, the people said. 
 
 Moelis is expected to run an auction for Playboy. It is possible the company will choose to sell itself in pieces or not sell at all and stay on its current course. 
 
 For six decades, Playboy helped shape the American discourse on sex, but in the past several years it has been fighting to maintain that pre-eminent cultural status amid sliding magazine sales and a digital landscape that makes adult material widely available. The magazine has a circulation of about 800,000, down from its peak of 5.6 million in 1975, according to Alliance for Audited Media. 
 
 Over the past few years, Playboy Chief Executive Scott Flanders has cut costs and shrunk head count after taking over as the company’s top executive in 2009 for Christie Hefner, Mr. Hefner’s daughter. 
 
 The company has endeavored to attract a younger audience as its long-standing brand of hedonism, with “bunnies” and “playmates,” became increasingly outmoded. The cover of the March 2016 issue, the first print edition to eschew nudity, was a visual ode to the mobile app Snapchat, designed to look like one of the service’s disappearing messages. 
 
 Mr. Hefner’s 24-year-old son, Cooper, criticized the move to remove nudity from the publication as well as the decision to sell the mansion and said his role in the company had diminished due to a difference of vision with the board. In August 2014, Playboy stopped publishing nudity on its website. The company has said the change helped drop the average user age from 47 to 30. 
 
 “Millennials and Gen-Y didn’t view nudity as the issue,” he told Business Insider in February. “The issue was the way in which the nudity and the girls were portrayed.” 
 
 From the Archives Playboy Enterprises will no longer publish images of nude women in its magazine as the iconic brand undergoes a transformation.(Originally published Oct. 13, 2015) 
 
 Marilyn Monroe appeared on the first cover of Playboy in 1953, and the magazine would go on to attain totemic status in popular culture and feature stars such as Farrah Fawcett, Sharon Stone and Madonna. 
 
 For those who, as the long-running joke goes, bought the magazine for the articles, Playboy published the work of John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Kurt Vonnegut, and ran interviews with luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Steve Jobs. 
 
 As the Playboy bunny-head logo became more recognizable and gained international appeal, the company extended beyond the magazine into a successful licensing business and a television operation that it later sold to Internet porn company Manwin. 
 
 —Jason Bellini contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Steven Perlberg at steven.perlberg@wsj.com and Dana Cimilluca at dana.cimilluca@wsj.com
– Playboy magazine has decided it no longer makes sense to try to compete with an Internet full of photos of naked women. The 62-year-old magazine is undergoing a major revamp and will dispense with nude photos when it relaunches in March, the New York Times reports. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passe at this juncture," Playboy CEO Scott Flanders tells the paper. The change apparently has the approval of 89-year-old founder and editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner, the BBC reports. The magazine will still feature racy photos of women, but analysts say the removal of nudes will be a big boost for its articles, including serious journalism and interviews, CNN reports. Flanders tells the Times that the target audience will be young, urban men. "The difference between us and Vice is that we're going after the guy with a job," he quips. The Playboy company now makes most of its money from licensing its brand, and Flanders tells the Times that the magazine loses around $3 million a year in the US, which is a cost the firm sees as an expense for their "Fifth Avenue storefront." The Times notes that the Playboy website became SFW and got rid of nudes last year, which execs say caused traffic to quadruple to 16 million users a month. The age of the average user dropped from 47 to 30. (A major porn site is offering a $25,000 college scholarship.)