Weeks before the Summer Olympics in London and the start of the National Football League’s training camps, Sports Illustrated is cutting editorial staff through buyouts and possible layoffs.
Terry McDonell, editor of the Time Inc. Sports Group, has asked reporters and editors to volunteer for buyout packages by June 21. Depending on the number of people who volunteer, he will decide whether he has to lay off any of the magazine’s 210 editorial employees.
Mr. McDonell would not provide numbers. In late 2008, when Time Inc. had buyouts and layoffs at several of its magazines, including Sports Illustrated, he had to ask about 40 people to leave out of a staff of 250.
Mr. McDonell said he was making these moves to cut costs and integrate the magazine and digital properties. Buyouts and layoffs could extend beyond Sports Illustrated and SportsIllustrated.com to its children’s editions and swimsuit issue, and to publications like Golf Magazine and Golf.com.
“Unfortunately, there will be some pain in this, meaning the reduction of staff,” Mr. McDonell said. “At this point I don’t know what the number will be but I do know that it will be substantially smaller than what we’ve done in the past.”
Repoz
Posted: June 18, 2012 at 03:35 PM |
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1. RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) Posted: June 18, 2012 at 03:49 PM (#4160223)Still, I've never understood why online ad rates are so much lower than print. Were advertisers secretly getting hosed all those years, or are print ads much more effective than banner ads?
Translation? "Now that we have the web people, we are cutting the print people since the web people are cheaper"?
the print folks will show that they have actual subscribers who by extension will definitely see the ads. web ads area a maybe.
but it is also true that print is more expensive and getting more so as the market contracts.
in the chicagoland area alone every local commercial printer is on cash in advance with paper suppliers and has been for about the last 18 months or so.
Print ads persist. If you're in a dentist's office looking at God knows what 1997 issue of Sports Illustrated, the ads are still working (even if ironically!) If the brand still exists, print ads from 50 or 75 years ago are still working on you when you see them in an antique store. Print advertisers may still be getting hosed, for all I know, but print does have that insuperable advantage.
Yes, they are getting hosed. Buy a newspaper read it and then go back and estimate how many ads you actually saw. No one knows which ads I actually looked at in the Inquirer this morning, but an ad doesn't get served if I'm not on the page on the site and you also know if I don't click.
Maybe his lack of seniority would have prevented Poz from being offerred a really sweet buyout package, but I can't imagine he would have been a layoff candidate or tasked to fetch coffee for the CFO.
It's just competition in action, there's a lot less friction online, while a print ad needs to be processed, printed and physically distributed. Every additional impression has a cost in consumables (paper, ink) and labor (printer, truck driver, paperboy). T
I love looking at ads in old magazine, while online ads fill me with rage. (I have a standing policy never to buy any product that's advertised in a video that precedes a video I want to watch. Hear that, YouTube?)
"Now that we have the web people, we are cutting the print people since the web people are cheaper"?
Writers are a dime a dozen. Upper management people, however, are irreplaceable.
How do you believe purveyors of online material should generate revenue?
My cousin's seven-year-old son recently said, "I hate TV commercials...they're like giant pop-up ads."
One day today's online ads will be quaint and adorably dated.
Yes, I'm already looking forward to one day reminiscing about those quaint and adorable "one weird old tip" ads that kept me coming back to BTF time and time again. (You thought it was the political threads? Ha!)
Though I've got to love this paragraph that was part of the story about the FTC crackdown against the "weird old tip" brigade. This was but one of a large number of w.o.t. defendants:
After reading that, I think that P.T. Barnum's estimate has to be adjusted from one a minute to one a second.
Exactly. Just be Playboy with more clothes and much better sports.
"I guess this would be about the time that they'd be making the travel plans to the Olympics, so it makes sense to do this kind of thing now. But I'm still surprised; I would think they'd want to wait for the London fortnight to end before reducing staff."
from TFA
Scott Novak, a spokesman for Sports Illustrated, stressed that this would not affect the magazine’s Summer Games coverage.
“Our coverage for the Olympics this year will exceed Beijing and include the publication of a new Olympic daily app,” Mr. Novak said.
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