Magazines Do More With Less

By: Kate Parham

Editor: Becky Taylor

Budget cuts, layoffs, fewer pages. Just another day at consumer magazines.

By now, it’s obvious that magazines are hurting. Some are folding, many are producing smaller issues and most have had major staff reductions.

Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., told The New York Times that her company laid off 600 employees last October. Condé Nast magazines have lost about 8,000 ad pages through the October issues compared with last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. And according to Audit Bureau of Circulations, newsstand sales were down for all but one of Hearst’s magazines.

The future of magazines is grim and many are struggling just to stay afloat. With less money to spend and fewer employees at work, numerous publications are forced to discover what it truly means to do more with less.

Nick Marino, managing editor at Paste Magazine in Atlanta, said, “We do a lot more ourselves than we used to: the staff has to write more, we’re all responsible for more in general, but that’s journalism in the 21^st century.”

Journalism’s new face does not exactly exude money. Even the big, national publications are feeling the effects of the current economic climate. In fact, according to The New York Times, after a three-month McKinsey & Company project at Hearst, several magazines were told to cut about 25 percent from their budgets.

According to Marino, Paste has also had to make budget cuts of 25 percent, in addition to smaller page counts for each issue. “Our editorial budget has been cut drastically,” said Marino. “We use different freelancers now, instead of the highest paid writers, but it’s ok because there is no shortage of people who want to write for us.”

Fewer staffers is a concept Kali Justus, editor at Lakelife Magazine in the Lake Oconee area of Georgia, can relate to. Justus is literally a one-woman show, as she has been the only full-time employee in the editorial department at Lakelife for over six months, but come October Justus will be joined by an associate editor.

“Before I got here there was only a part-time editor and maybe one intern per summer,” Justus said. “Some of the decisions that have been made by the publishers, like hiring two full-time employees, reflect a growing need for in-house workers, which is of high value these days.”

However, Lakelife has been moving in both directions—in-house growth and freelance needs—according to Justus. “The previous editor did not rely as much on freelancers because the stories tended to be a lot longer,” Justus said. “Whereas I’ve added a good many more stories, but cut down on length, which has created a need for additional freelancers.”

In Justus’ opinion, the increased need for freelancers is very simple. “If you have more stories, that’s a lot more places that one person needs to be.”

Blair Rivkin, managing editor at Athena Magazine and Athens Parent, has personally felt the heat from the current economic weather.

“Personally, I took a pretty big pay cut earlier this year,” Rivkin said. “The publisher had some tough financial decisions to make in order to keep the magazines alive, and it came down to either laying people off or slashing pay—so I gladly took the pay cut.”

However not everyone at Athena and Athens Parent felt the same way. “Unfortunately, the publisher did have to let a couple of people go,” Rivkin said. “We were a small staff to begin with when I came on, so to lose even one person was heartbreaking.”

Ramsey Nix, editor at Lake Oconee Living, is in the same boat. “We saw our biggest decline in ad revenue between last fall and last winter,” Nix said. “We were up to 168 pages and by last winter we were down to 112, so that was quite a dip.”

Nix said that Lake Oconee Living has instituted a much stricter budget- of $4,000 per issue for freelance, compared with $6,000-$8,000 in years past. “It’s not much at all, once you break it down between the eight features we run in each issue and the eight departments we have at the magazine,” Nix said. “Once you break it down, it’s spread really thin.”

Lake Oconee Living has also seen staff reductions. “We used to have five staff members and now we’re down to three,” Nix said. But rather than increasing their freelance budget, Nix said that, “We’re just doing more work.”

Rivkin is no stranger to the heavy workload either; however, her outlook gives hope to all those in the magazine industry. “All of the work is worth it when we see that finished product,” Rivkin said.