How our jobs have changed

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1998 by Barbara Love

A major challenge posed by people working always at peak levels is finding time to think. "I don't believe people do their most creative thinking when they are under stress," says Potter. "You have to find ways to carve out time to think, and give permission to your staff to set aside time in their daily grind to think."

"Everyone feels stretched out and stressed out," says Sue Rice, senior vice president, human resources at Cahners Business Information. "That's sort of the nature of the workforce today. It's not only the work. It's the fact that you're accessible 24 hours a day by voice mail, the Internet, home faxes, car phones and video conferencing."

Striving for higher margins

You might say these are good times for magazines and good times for the economy in general, so why are people running so hard?

At the beginning of 1993, the magazine publishing industry was still coping with a market of much reduced growth rates, points out John Wickersham, president and CEO of Bill Communications Inc. in New York City. Fortunately, five years later, the climate has changed rather dramatically. Many advertisers, understanding that consistent advertising is critical to building brand equity, have since returned, boosting our growth rates.

But, he says, the most healthy publishers continue to challenge themselves for higher margins.

Tom Kemp, chairman and CEO of Cleveland-based Penton Publishing, says, "There is increasing financial pressure on all publishers--even more than five years ago--because of a fairly dramatic change in ownership, with large publicly-held companies, overseas companies, and a lot more financial players getting involved.

With financial owners increasingly setting the agenda, executives are feeling some conflict between following a successful growth formula and cashflow needs. "A question being asked more and more by executives is, `What's really going on here?'" says one consumer magazine publishing company vice president. "If the first requirement is to produce cash-flow, the logic of long-term strategic planning is theoretical at best."

Growth in new directions

"Brand extensions became a way of life after ad pages collapsed," says Gordon Hughes, president of the American Business Press. "At first it was a defensive position. But now brand extensions are seen as a glorious new world, and they've started to take off."

"We have a different perspective today," says Douglas Shore, chairman and co-CEO, Shore-Varrone, Inc., in Atlanta. "Brand extensions are bigger than what we used to call ancillary activities. They may in fact be bigger than the core product, which is the magazine. We're looking for ways to become more important to our market."

Shore-Varrone, like many other "magazine" publishers, is more and more beyond the printed pages. "We're a lot less ink-on-paper as a portion of our business than we were five years ago," says Shore. "If I go back to 1992, I'd have to guess magazine revenue represented 95 percent of our business. Now it's closer to 60 percent."