Schedules: recognizing reality

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 1989 by Jeff Parnau

Schedules: Recognizing reality

If I had to use the fewest words to say as much as possible about magazine production schedules, I might say this: In most cases, it can't be done.

But the reason isn't due to mechanical factors. The main reason is psychological. It has to do with publishing personalities and how the staff perceives the product itself. Enough dancing around. Let me make it more clear, by use of example.

John was a self-made publisher. He started out, classically enough, on his kitchen table. He had a mission: to take his thoughts to the masses, to produce a perfect magazine, and to become rich in the process.

Getting rich would take him 10 years, and for most of that period, he was understaffed. Being understaffed, he worked 16-hour days and never had time to get everything right. He'd help with artwork, do proofreading, drive the truck, or do whatever it took to get the magazine in the best shape possible before that ugly deadline arrived.

And deadlines were always the same. We might work until 7:00 PM and then realize that we'd better start to wrap it up, or we wouldn't be done before 2:00 AM. So we'd feverishly start to cut corners. We'd let captions go directly to paste-up because we had no time left for proofreading. We'd remake a three-page layout to accommodate a last-minute ad--but not have enough time to confirm that the article was still in its original order. And finally, at 2:00 or 3:00 AM, we'd just give up, pack it in a box, throw it in a trunk, and catch a few hours of sleep before delivering it all to the printer.

This was routine. And it became clear, as the staff got larger, that it was not occurring because we were forever understaffed. No matter how we grew, the deadlines were still a mess. Why?

It had to do with the publisher's vision of the product. It was his baby, and he felt it could always be better, and he wanted it better. But he knew that we would never have enough time to get it perfect, so we'd work as hard and as long as possible, and then give up. If we did anything less (like knock off at 5:00 PM on deadline day), we would be robbing his baby of potential perfection.

But this publisher was not unique. Of the four publishers I have worked closely with, he was typical. True, there are some cool heads out there--the publishers who take the job in stride, work a routine day and then head home to play with the dog. But in my experience, the man I just described is a classic example of the entrepreneurial publisher who takes the one-man approach to the staff level.

The question, and the topic of this column: How do you put this guy on a schedule?

The answer: You don't. You work for him, and that's how he works. You work until you panic or fall over, and then you do it again. If you don't like it, get a new job. But there is a potential solution. It has to do with power. Or put more gently, with authority. Listen up:

Before you bother making a schedule, confirm that someone has the authority to enforce it.

In the above case, you would not give that authority to the publisher. And if the publisher won't give it to you, forget the schedule.

If, then, I have the authority to enforce a schedule, I can set out to draft a realistic schedule. I'll run through that exercise now. Because all publishing operations are different, let's use this example:

* Monthly, 96 pages plus cover

* 25 percent black and white editorial

* 25 percent color editorial

* 25 percent color advertising

* 25 percent black and white advertising

* Editorial output: Computer disk

* Typesetting: Internal

* Page assembly: Mixed electronic/manual

* Stripping/separations: Outside film house

* Material supplied to printer: Film negatives

* Customer's significance to printer: 50

* Customer's significance to film house: 50

What are those last two variables? On a scale of zero to 100, they represent how important you are to your vendors. If you are 100 percent important, they'll drop other work and pull other publishers out of their shop no matter how late you are. But if you have a significance of zero, you will either stick to your schedule or forget about getting your work done. The 50 figures above can be interpreted to mean that if you go late, you may or may not get help from the vendor.

There is no practical way to schedule creativity. Editorial sometimes includes writing; other times it refers only to editing. Gone with the Wind sat on a shelf for 20 years before the author felt it was ready to go to the publisher.

However, you can easily implement DROP DEAD dates for editorial. This term (also applied to advertising cutoff dates) implies that if something isn't done by a certain date, forget it. It won't go in the issue.

Have realistic expectations

But you can use your own realistic "window" to estimate how much editorial must be achieved within a certain span. For a monthly magazine, you typically have about 20 working days per title. With all 50 pages of editorial, it doesn't take a calculator to figure out that your editorial staff releases, on the average, 2.5 pages per day.