Number Crunch: Downsizing at the Newsweeklies

Layoffs. That's just about the only news in the magazine business at the moment, and it's happening on a scale the industry's never seen before.

But for some magazines, it's not entirely a new experience. The big newsweeklies and business titles have been periodically downsizing for years -- closing foreign bureaus, shedding layers of reporters and researchers, buying out the oldest and priciest editors.

In fact, it's been going on so long and so gradually, I realized I have no real quantitative idea just what it's meant. So I did a little exercise: I dug up the mastheads of a number of magazines from 10 years ago and laid them alongside their recent counterparts for comparison. I started with Time and Newsweek.*

A couple caveats. First, these are just snapshots, and therefore somewhat arbitrary. The headcount for Time, for instance, won't reflect the current drive by parent Time Inc. to shed some 600 positions company-wide, while the tally for Newsweek was affected by a buyout earlier this year that resulted in some 111 departures.

Also, this is far from a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. I didn't want to get bogged down in the details of who's on staff, who's a part-time contributor, who's a stringer, etc., so I pretty much just counted everyone on the editorial masthead equally. (Even that wasn't as simple as it sounds. Is Time's makeup department part of editorial? For my purposes it's not.) Some of those who took the Newsweek buyout are still listed as contributing editors; they're counted exactly as they would be if they were still on staff. So, in other words, don't look at this as anything other than an extremely rough gauge of the long-term trend with some interesting footnotes.

Now: the numbers.

Time editorial masthead circa 1998: 349
Time editorial masthead circa 2008: 213
Percent shrinkage: 39.0

Newsweek editorial masthead circa 1998: 255
Newsweek editorial masthead circa 2008: 212
Percent shrinkage: 16.9

Notes:

At first glance, it seems obvious that Time has downsized at a far faster rate than Newsweek, leaving the two titles almost perfectly even in size now. This may be a little deceptive; at Newsweek, cutbacks at a number of editorial levels (senior writers, editorial assistants and, especially, general editors) were partially offset by an increase in the number of contributing editors, from 19 to 28. As noted above, some of those contributing editors are people who recently took buyouts. At Time, meanwhile, the number of people listed as "contributors" dwindled from 48 a decade ago to 33 this year.

But, of course, a lot of the shrinkage at Time has been very real. The single biggest contraction was in the category of "correspondents," where the number of names fell from 83 to 35. Another way to look at it is in terms of how many cities or regions those correspondents represented. The number listed went from 28 in 1998 to 18 this year.

Next up: the business magazines.

Update: Josh Appelbaum at the Project for Excellence in Journalism points out that his group has been tracking staffing at Time and Newsweek for years; their report includes charts that break out the trends by number of bureaus and contributors.

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*I was originally going to include U.S. News & World Report in this comparison, but now that it's not even a weekly anymore, it doesn't seem fair. The Economist, meanwhile, doesn't print a masthead.

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