Of Publishing and Perishing

I spent my Saturday with friends and former colleagues in the publishing biz. When we talked business, the conversations traveled a familiar path: advertising is down, budgets are tight, jobs are imperiled. 

None of which is surprising to the graybeards in our group. This is the fourth recession of my publishing career.

I went to J school in the late ’70s, when the evening newspapers were going out of business. The experts told us that there were currently more journalism students than there were jobs in journalism — not job openings, but total jobs. 

It took me nine months to get my first job, which was at a start-up alternative newsweekly in St. Louis that paid me $120 a week. My duties included driving a truck 150 miles to the printer’s every Tuesday afternoon. I’d play pinball until the papers started coming off the press, then I’d load them in the truck and drive back to St. Louis in the middle of the night.

As it turned out, alternative newsweeklies were a good place to start your career, although no one seemed to realize it in the early ’80s, when the economy cratered and advertising dollars were hard to come by. It was obvious a few years later, when the papers were thick with ads and staff salaries were competitive. But in 1980, when I started, even my friends thought the enterprise was a joke and my career was over before it started.

The next recession came in the early ’90s, a few months after I got a cool job as a feature writer at a start-up daily paper. The paper was financed with junk bonds, and when Michael Milken went down, so did the paper. 

My next gig was a crap job at a stupid magazine that lasted all of four months before I popped off to the boss and got my ass fired. Many of my former colleagues at the failed paper weren’t even that lucky; I suspect quite a few left publishing altogether. Once again, it looked like my field, and the people in it, were permanently diminished. 

I moved across the country to L.A. to go to grad school for creative writing at USC. The recession had deepened by then, and jobs were hard to come by. But, thanks to a blind ad in the L.A. Times, I got an interview at Men’s Fitness, a magazine I’d never heard of, which led to a part-time copyediting gig at Muscle & Fitness, a magazine I’d heard of but never read, and some freelance assignments at MF.

MF hired me on full-time in early ’92, at a salary that was less than I’d earned in 1989 at my last newspaper job. But, as luck would have it, the early ’90s were a pretty good time to get started in fitness journalism. The field didn’t even exist when I was in J school, but with the success of magazines like Men’s Health and Shape, it turned into a hot category, and probably still is.

I went from MF to MH in 1998, which was just ahead of yet another recession. This one, in the early ’00s, dovetailed with the dot-com bust. People who thought they were millionaires, thanks to their stock options, discovered that not only were they not rich, they weren’t even employed. At MH, we had to watch colleagues lose their jobs as the company killed magazines, jettisoned entire departments, and reorganized everything else. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion: My laid-off colleagues became pioneers in the yet-to-be-named field of gigonomics, where many discovered that they could do the same work for more pay and less hassle as freelancers. I’m sure somebody somewhere is still bitter about being laid off, but all the ones I know are much happier without staff positions.

I went off into the gigosphere in 2004 with a combination of excitement about being my own boss and terror over supporting my family without a guaranteed biweekly paycheck. As before, though, it worked out fine. The money was probably the same after factoring in inflation and the cost of supplying my own health insurance and retirement plan, but the freedom of freelancing made me feel as if I’d come out way ahead.

Six months ago, just in time for recession #4, I decided to join the team at Testosterone Muscle with a hybrid job that offers the best of both worlds — it’s full-time, but allows me to work from home. 

Which brings me back to the current crisis in publishing. Every newspaper, it seems, is under severe financial stress — this column is the go-to source for the daily roundup of news that makes publishing professionals want to start drinking before noon. My friend Brian Walton notes on his new blog that our mutual hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hasn’t been spared.

The problem isn’t just with the newspapers. It’s the companies that paid way too fucking much money to buy those papers when the economy was hot and credit was easy. The papers are now being crushed with debt that has nothing to do with their operations.

That said, it’s not like the papers would all be doing fine if they’d just stayed with local ownership. The Internet started pulling away classified advertising a few years back, and nothing has been easy since. At least one paper claims to have lost 40 percent of its ad revenue since 2006. Magazine advertising was down almost 12 percent in 2008.

That’s serious.

But it’s not fatal. Here’s why I’m optimistic for my profession:

The audience is at least as hungry as ever for real news, real information. Bloggers are terrific for amalgamating and analyzing news, but busy, powerful, and influential people in sports, politics, business, and entertainment are still going to limit access to a small handful of credentialed reporters from established news media. That makes professional reporters and editors more important than ever, since more people are paying attention to everything they write.

The only problem is that the audience doesn’t want to pay for information — not directly, anyway. They’ll pay for cable TV and high-speed Internet and wireless handhelds that deliver the news, but they don’t want to buy newspapers that only give them news they’d already know if they cared enough to seek it out.

So how do news operations bring in enough revenue to survive?

Nobody’s really figured that out. Esquire sold a gimmicky cover ad for a quarter-million dollars, but I subscribe to the magazine and didn’t even notice the ad until I read about it in the New York Times.

As a veteran of three previous recessions, here’s my guess about the fourth: When there’s an audience hungry for what you have to offer, someone will figure out a way to monetize it. Maybe online media will revert to the model from the early days of television, and use a single sponsor. (“Philco presents … The New York Times Online!”) Maybe traditional news reporting needs to go to an NPR-type nonprofit model, and rely on reader donations and corporate sponsorships.

Whatever it is, two things are pretty clear:

* readers don’t want to pay directly for access to news

* advertisers don’t want to throw money at readers who actively avoid ads

Those seem like intractable barriers to viability. And maybe they are. But in my experience, the hunger for information always trumps temporarily glitches in the delivery of that information.

In other words, it’ll work out. It always does.

Tags: Tags: economy, magazines, Media, newspapers