Magazines
In magazines, it looks worse than it is
By Kevin Downey
Nov 4, 2008 - 8:58:14 AM

The weak ad economy is whacking the magazine industry with plummeting ad pages and hundreds of job cuts. Just yesterday, Rodale said it was cutting 10 percent of its workforce, or 111 jobs. The job cuts will likely continue, even after the economy rebounds, as readers continue to migrate from print to the internet and other new media.

But all that said, the magazine job market isn’t nearly as bad off as the job cuts would suggest. It's not the newspaper business.

In fact, new magazine jobs are being created and publishers are reaching out to fill vacancies. Recruiters say they aren’t being inundated with resumes from newly laid off magazine employees.

“There are still jobs and there’s some hiring going on,” says Risa Goldberg, president of Media Recruiting Group in Irvington, N.Y.

The magazine job market is bad but not terrible, says Jackie Riley, senior executive recruiter at Lynne Palmer Executive Recruitment. “From my perspective, we haven’t really skipped a beat. There is a lot of activity. We haven’t seen a downward trend.”

At this stage, the cuts appear deepest in the lower ranks of sales. Says Goldberg: "I think the outer offices are getting harder hit than New York, although New York is soft.”

A big reason the market isn’t crashing is because many magazines have been operating with lean staffs for years. Simply put, there's just not that much fat to cut. In that regard, magazines are much like media agencies, which remained lean from the last ad downturn of 2001 even after business picked up.

Magazines are also unlike newspapers, which are being downsized in the face of increasing flights of readers and advertisers with the rise of the internet. Those readers and advertisers are not coming back.

For magazines, the immediate issue is the ad slowdown, which in the third quarter alone led to ad pages falling nearly 13 percent compared to the year-earlier period, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Longer-term magazines also face the loss of readers and advertisers to the internet but at not nearly the pace newspapers are experiencing.

But in the meantime, as publishers struggle with declining revenues, more layoffs are likely, along with hiring freezes and allowing positions to go unfilled.

That's certain to be the case the rest of this year into the next. “We’re seeing a lot of caution for 2009, so people are reluctant to fill jobs,” says Rick Jones, president and CEO of magazine consulting firm DJG Marketing.

Just when magazines might come back is the big puzzle, but most forecasters don't see improvement in overall media spending until 2010.

Most are predicting the overall ad market will get weaker in 2009.

Through those lean times, magazines will be beefing up their digital operations, anticipating the longer-term decline of their print titles in favor of the web, and that will mean more and more jobs within online operations.

It will not be an easy transition, however, if not quite on the scale of turmoil that's being seen in newspapers, as publishers struggle to adapt to new business models, in many cases with far lower ad revenues.