Comments on: About Time

By: David Zent

David Zent — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:19:49 +0000

Interesting post, but I am often astonished that writers such as yourself neglect to check their own spelling and grammar, such as is evidenced on this page. It’s a small point, I know, but my mom was an English teacher, and drilled me into checking everything I write, so my eye picks it up unbidden. It’s rampant on the net, especially. My guess is that editors will not go out of business any time soon. Other than that, nice job…

By: They’re cutting into the bone! | andrewcoyne.com

They’re cutting into the bone! | andrewcoyne.com — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 07:05:09 +0000

[...] MORE: Former People staffer Jeff Jarvis has some equally sympathetic reflections. [...]

By: Meg Q

Meg Q — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:11:36 +0000

Macleans in Canada has been reinventing itself (successfully, I believe - I actually buy it now, as do other people I know, and their circ figures are going up) by using real writers on interesting topics and featuring some signature columnists. The celebrity crap is limited to an amusing 2-page spread. Shocking, I know. No blogger that I know or read links to Time or People. The only time I ever have - or any other blogger I read - was in December when Time so kindly named me "Person of the Year".

By: Owen

Owen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:34:01 +0000

This is not truly a surprise to me - I’ve worked at trade and consumer publications - first print, then web, for over 25 years. The more consumer and /or larger the publications got, the more inefficient. I stared in the UK on the largest personal computer monthly - we hit 500 pages per month at times. We had about 8 freelancers. We had five editors and writers. We had two production staff, one admin and shared graphic resources. I was expected to produce about 40,000 words a month - about 3/4 edited and 1/4 written. I was astonished at the staff ‘needed’ when I moved to the US.

Since then I have worked on publish-as-soon-as-ready, daily, weekly and monthly publications. The most inefficient were the largest but none were as bad as described for People above.

However, I think the real problem (and it is a problem at a lot of ‘official’ publications) is the indefinite cycle of editing outlined above. Yes, publishing in print can’t really be retracted so you do want an editor - but one good edit is enough. I truly dislike publications that leave no room for the writer’s voice.

By: The Sanity Inspector

The Sanity Inspector — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:14:35 +0000

Just like I used to look at the skin magazines only for the articles, I now only look at the newsmagazines for the photographs.

By: Garbanzo

Garbanzo — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:28:53 +0000

When I worked for Newsweek just after college in the late ’80s, I was amazed at how little work people had compared to newspaper newsrooms where I had worked (and turning out 1,000+ words a day was not uncommon). Clearly, there are great reporters who can’t write well and great writers who have no reporting skills, but this style of homogenized journalism seemed to replace an immediacy in the story with a false knowing snarkiness (as if some writer sitting in an office on Madison Avenue could get a sense of what was happening in the field). In addition to the inefficiency of editing and readbacks (i.e., you spoke to the reporter and made sure that the writer interpreted the dispatch correctly), I was also amazed at how Newsweek (and later, I discovered, other newsweeklies) lifted reporting, quotes, and research from one another. And while The Times and The Post do employ a bit of “rewrite” to major stories, I think most of their “day of” stories are equal or superior to the newsweeklies (of course, The Times has bloat in a different way with a 1,200 person newsroom and a $200+ million newsgathering budget).

Still interested to hear anyone’s view on what unions have to do with all this. One word from a friend at Newsweek is that they can’t efficiently restructure without a big knock-down/drag-out with the Guild, and Time Inc. also has representation there. Just look at the Guild talks at The Times (Times: We need to restructure our newsgathering to fit the 21st century. Guild: 1950 work rules are just fine!).

By: pbdotc

pbdotc — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 15:25:08 +0000

who will all the bloggers link to when time and people are gone?

I WEEP FOR THE BLOGGERS.

By: TAM Money and Finance » Time Inc. Drops the Axe on Almost 300

TAM Money and Finance » Time Inc. Drops the Axe on Almost 300 — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:35:31 +0000

[...] UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis, founder of Entertainment Weekly notes the Time Inc. approach is massively inefficient in our day and age [via OTB]: 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. [...]

By: Delia

Delia — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:17:26 +0000

penny: still, I don’t think they are in the same category with People and Entertainment Weekly… (they at least have to do decent research on the MSM, I would think…) oh, well… no big deal, either way… D.

By: WHAT’S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS » TIME INC. MAGAZINES AND THE GOOD OLD TIMES…

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:20:18 +0000

[...] Jeff Jarvis explains very well why Time Inc. magazines were and are very inefficient. [...]

By: SpaceyG

SpaceyG — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:07:42 +0000

I think Penny is really Rupert Murdoch - in drag as Bill O’Reilly.

By: surya

surya — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:58:13 +0000

Wow. Awesome insight. I had no idea– the market economy at work!

By: penny

penny — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:54:31 +0000

Time and Newsweek are so passe. They hardly exist outside of the dentist’s office anymore. The content is boring, predictable and agenda driven. They feature stories around the superficial MSM news issue of the week. The weekly covers are predictable.

I’m sure Obama is/will be gracing their covers. He’s shallow. No thinking person would elect someone on such a paltry record in the times we live in. The MSM is shallow. They created him. He’ll fade in due time. Hopefully the insipid MSM, purveyors of fluff, will too.

The paradigm of carefully selected formulaic content, further dumbed down and sanitized by pc self-censorship that riddles the MSM, by editorial committee is so dated and over.

By: dcinput » Blog Archive » dcinput daily for Fri 19th Jan, 2007

dcinput » Blog Archive » dcinput daily for Fri 19th Jan, 2007 — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:34:53 +0000

[...] It’s very interesting to see how other industries are being affected by the web. Jeff Jarvis tells a story about his experience of working for People, following 289 people loosing their jobs at Time inc yesterday. [...]

By: Delia

Delia — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:24:36 +0000

Jeff,

I think it really depends on the kind of story: I’d like to think that Time is in a different category than People and Entertainment Weekly, but I could be wrong…

Delia

P.S. I *do* wish people writing about craigslist, for instance, would really take their time: do the research and do it well, consult with others and all that good stuff… (you’d think they would be much less likely to fall in all the traps…) D.

By: W.T. Dowell

W.T. Dowell — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:11:24 +0000

The original idea behind TIME was not a bad one. It was essentially to deploy a battalion of crack reporters stationed around the world, and to see if they could come up with added value that the wires and everyone else had missed. Luce’s TIME may not have been that great, but the magazine achieved real power under Henry Grunwald, probably its greatest editor. It was an international platform of unprecedented power at a time when the U.S. was still regarded as a benevolent force. It is an irony that TIME’s destruction came partly from People, a magazine that long ago invaded the darker realms previously inhabited by the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids. Publishing the combination of dolled up press releases from publicity hungry starlets and otherwise engaging in unrestrained vulgarity cost People a fraction of what serious reporting demanded in TIME. Eventually, People’s financial success –even though based on a visit to the dark side–made its editors and publishing folk look more successful in pure business terms than their colleagues. They were soon dispatched to TIME to produce similar profits. With little or no idea of what TIME was about, they cut the ground out from under the magazine. It became obvious years ago that the corporation wanted to put its money into ventures that were likely to pay more than print. The question was how to kill TIME without being too obvious about it. The solution was to make it irrelevant, which is by and large what they accomplished. Mainstream American journalism today is largely a matter of repackaging, or rephrasing what other people have produced. TIME’s managers have clearly decided to follow the trend and cheap it out. The wonder is not that TIME’s current management succeeded in destroying what was once the world’s leading news magazine, but that that despite all the damage that was done, it took so long to die.

By: CaptiousNut

CaptiousNut — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:23:47 +0000

Those laid off are lucky.

They probably got at least 3 months severance pay and are re-entering a very strong labor market in Manhattan.

And they got a helpful signal to rejigger their careers.

By: Dan Egger

Dan Egger — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:48:41 +0000

Wow, I always thought those would be great jobs.

I worked in the videogame magazine business and we typically had between 4 and 5 editorial staffers per monthly magazine. (Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, PlayStation Magazine, etc.) Of course we also used about half a dozen freelancers each month, but the vast majority of the magazine was in the hands of the main editorial staff.

We never won any Pulitzers, but we never missed a ship date.

Still, the one article per week assignment sounds like a lazy writer’s (me!) dream.

By: Mumblix Grumph

Mumblix Grumph — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:47:13 +0000

Is this why so many MSM media people are big government Democrats? It is the only environment to which they can relate?

One story per week! Damn, that hardly leaves time for 3 hour lunches and water cooler chit chat.