Time is running out on Chicago.
Ditto for People.
Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, on Thursday announced the elimination of nearly 300 jobs in a sweep of its titles, including its flagship newsweekly Time, top moneymaker People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly.
Among the casualties will be the Chicago bureaus for both Time and People, which have three and four staffers, respectively.
Besides bailing out of Chicago, Time is closing its bureaus in Atlanta and Los Angeles, though a source said the magazine will keep three “laptop correspondents” there. Seven of its more than 40 editorial positions being eliminated will be in Washington.
People’s restructuring includes cutting its bureaus in Washington, Miami and Austin, Texas. The magazine is losing 44 editorial employees. However, seven new jobs are being created as part of the effort to boost its presence online and via other digital technologies, which increasingly seem the future for so many media entities, as opposed to old-fashioned paper and ink that arrives in the mail.
Time Inc. Editor in Chief John Huey, in a memo to editorial staff concerning the layoffs, said Chairman and Chief Executive Ann Moore “has made the convincing case that what we are doing now is essential” to the company’s evolution into an efficient, multiplatform content provider.
All told, Time Warner’s Time Inc. is shedding 289 jobs, 172 of them in editorial, more than 5 percent of the company’s global editorial staff, and the rest from the business side. Some of those axed will get pink slips, effective next month. In other cases, volunteers will be sought.
What this means to readers may be that the weeklies’ costly decades-old practice of siccing small armies of correspondents on stories in an effort to reveal more detail than those media outlets that don’t have as much time to do their reporting, seems destined to draw to an end. Whether readers will notice or care as the magazines become more geared toward delivering news as it happens along with the rest of the press is anyone’s guess.
In combination with the 530 employees cut loose as Time Inc. sells titles such as Parenting and Field & Stream, and the cutting of 600 or so jobs last year, the paring will reduce the company’s workforce to around 10,500. The cutbacks, restructuring and refocusing under Moore have come at least partly in response to the pressure Wall Street has placed on all traditional media companies to show growth.
“Progress brings change, and we need to continue to evolve to meet the cost pressures and challenges presented by our rapidly shifting industry,” Moore wrote in her own memo, noting that “difficult times also bring opportunity.”
While Time Inc. isn’t going to put as much cash into Chicago as it has, rest assured it will continue to try to take cash out, with the company continuing to have what a spokeswoman described as a “significant sales presence” in its local advertising office to service its many titles.
In the end, it’s not about people or People, time or Time, it’s about fortune and money.
BETTER TO LOOK AHEAD: With the debut of the 2007-08 TV season roughly eight months away and the networks’ fall schedule not set to be unveiled until May, NBC nonetheless announced this week it’s renewing “My Name is Earl,” “The Office,” “Law & Order: SVU” and the rookie drama “Heroes.”
A FINE SENDOFF: Boni Fine, 54, who during her year as Sun-Times Media Group vice president of advertising oversaw a major restructuring of her department, is retiring, the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and dozens of other area papers announced.
Succeeding Fine is John J. Martin, 50, whose two-year stint as vice president and general manager of CBS Radio’s WBBM-FM 96.3 ended a year ago.
ACHY-BREAKING HEART: Columnist Jay Mariotti, who this month underwent an angioplasty and insertion of a stent, returned to the pages of the Sun-Times on Thursday, well ahead of the Super Bowl date his bosses targeted.
THE LAST WORD: “You know what I hate about people who criticize you? They criticize what you say but they never give you credit for how loud you say it.”–Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, to Bill O’Reilly, on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”
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Phil Rosenthal’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Recent columns can be found at bancodeprofissionais.com/rosenthal.
philrosenthal@tribune.com
