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Time Inc. Cuts 289 Jobs
Earlier this week the New York Timesreported that Time Inc. planned to lay off 150 people with half of the jobs coming from the editorial departments of Time's popular magazines.
Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner, is planning to cut more than 150 people, about half of them in editorial jobs across the company’s best-known titles, like People, Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune. The cuts follow about 600 last year, many of them from the company’s business side, and a decision to trim its roster by selling 18 of its roughly 150 titles.
Time Inc.'s top executive, Ann S. Moore, has not yet publicly outlined or discussed the cuts, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. But other executives said that, while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the Internet.
To prepare for the future, they said, the company is cutting costs now and continuing to shift resources to its branded Web sites.
Unfortunately, Ad Age reports the real number of Time Inc. job cuts is 289 -- almost twice what the New York Times had reported. Eat the Press notes that this is Time Inc's second round of layoffs in less than a month -- the last one came just before Christmas. Gawker has a letter sent to People magazine stringers as well as other memos. Editorial job cuts have been an ongoing trend in the magazine and newspaper industries.
Jane Genova writes, "Unemployment has morphed into an equal-opportunity disease. Writers, because we tend to be underpaid (at least as compared to management), used to be immune from layoffs. No more. Today, 172 of the 289 axed at Time Inc. were editorial folks. As a writer who was blindsided when I was canned in 1987, my heart goes out to them. They always need writers, we thought - wrongly."
While the New York Timesarticle mentioned that the number of writers covering Britney Spears' antics and career may be reduced to just one, the Writer's Blog says it is really the serious reporting that is getting axed: "Serious stories, like world events, politics and science are being cut at all major news outlets so that there can be more coverage of celebrites' antics. And that does not bode well for the state of journalism or for our society."
