Magazine Industry Efficiency...or not...
cn | 19 January, 2007 13:58Jeff Jarvis, at Buzz Machine, has an insightful post about how magazines (specifically news magazines) produce their final product. And he ain't a fan...
The first day, I was given 30 pages of correspondents’ notes and wrote a 400-word story in the morning. Piece of cake... I asked for the next story. They had nothing. For five days straight, it was the same tale. At the end of the week, they offered me the job. But one of the old hands from Time Inc. pulled me aside and growled, “Don’t ever do that again.” I couldn’t figure out what he was telling me until I arrived and sat in a meeting of writers with then-Managing Editor Pat Ryan as she told them, “Listen, people we really need to improve productivity; I expect you all to get up to writing one story a week.”
So I wonder what everyone there is doing with their time? And are these...um...lower productivity workers...getting the same pay as our friend Jeff Jarvis? Probably. In fact, probably more...Anyway, Jarvis goes on:
Mind you, once reported by a cadre of correspondents and written by a staff writer in New York, it was edited (read: rewritten) by a senior editor and edited (yes, rewritten), by an assistant managing editor, and then edited (and, with surprising freqency, rewritten) by the managing editor. And then the research came along to try to correct all the errors this process inserted in the story. (This is how People famous declared Abe Vigoda dead; he was next see in an ad in Variety holding up a copy of that magazine while sitting up in a coffin.) And alongside all this, there were photo researchers and editors and layout artists and production people galore — all to perfect that 400-word tome about some small moment in life. Oh, and to make sure they had the very best 400-word celebrity haiku, they “slashed” two to four stories for every slot in the magazine — that is, they went through this entire process for at least twice as many stories as would actually be printed.
Imagine that this is how business-at-large works, because it probably is, and imagine if we could use the resources wasted in the fashion described by Jarvis for more productive means, what kind of world we might live in?
NOOO!!! is the cry from the workers, from the employees - all fearing the loss of their comfortable jobs - and rightfully so. If they do not produce, is it the obligation of the company to pay them?
Perhaps not, which brings us to the goals of the company. Let's assume the company's eclipsing goal is profits. Profits now. Then we can assume layoffs are in order because efficiency is God and we want to make the bucks now. But now let's assume that the company's goal is to produce the best damn magazine out there, the effect of which will be a profitable enterprise, then those workers who are currently redundant may well be able to shift their responsibilities and open up new opportunities for themselves and the company...IF the company first wants to produce a good product rather than first wanting to return a good immediate profit. This also assumes that the worker - the staff editors and writers in this case - actually want to work...which might be a stretch.
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