And the Latest in the Sucks-to-Be-You Series of Layoff Announcements: Time Warner Plans Big

Time Warner is announcing a $100 million charge it's prepared to take next week to cover the costs associated with a round of layoffs, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal says the layoffs will affect about 6 percent of Time's total workforce, "a similar percentage to job cuts last year, as part of a broad reorganization of Time Inc. Time Warner took a charge of $119 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 to reflect severance and other costs from the restructuring." That seems like a lot of money, but when you figure that approximately 3 billion people are directly employed by the sprawling Time Warner colossus, it's probably a small amount then. It's good to have things in perspective.

Seriously, though, despite news that the recession officially ended in the July-to-September third quarter of 2009, the layoffs in the magazine media industry seem to be coming more frequently. And the announcements these days are coming from the big guys -- Time Warner, Forbes, Condé Nast, etc. I suspect that's because the smaller companies never staffed-up as much as they could have in the good times, and they pared costs more quickly as the bad times set in. The behemoths move slowly. But this seems like an odd time for the big guys to be slicing staff. If things are improving, they're going to be without experienced staff, and when content is what counts, they're going to be scrambling to provide high-quality content from freelancers and junior staffers. After all, magazine readership has risen -- yes, risen -- in the past decade, not fallen off a cliff, so this seems a bit odd. But maybe that's how MBAs think.

Magazine News: Writing off $25 billion at Time Warner

At the magazine I edit, I'm paring expenses to the tune of $600 off this photography budget, $1,200 off that production budget, $400 off the staff lunch budget. So I'm – what's the word?? – gobsmacked at the news that Time Warner is writing off $25 billion of the value of its new- and old-media properties. I could buy a lot of staff lunches with even just 10 percent of that.
Time Warner's new-media property is AOL, once a raging behemoth of popularizing the Internet revolution, but it soon turned into a big anchor around the neck of Ted Turner's fortune.
The old-media properties include Time, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and about a zillion more. Each has long been a leader in its respective market niche.
Despite the mind-boggling number of $25 billion, it's really indicative of the loss of value of many media properties, from Playboy's stock drop to Starlog's circulation plunge. And on and on.
It's getting very ugly out there. And my fear is this: Those laptop "experts" who spout off about what everyone else should do in their industry will use this to pound away at anyone they deem "out of touch" enough to still be in the print industry. The Atlantic web site even has someone predicting the end of the New York Time's print edition within the next few months.
There are a lot of people who think print is useless, but I think they're overplaying their hands, because there's still benefit to having a hard copy that one can read while sprawled on a couch and that is – to use a current term – persistent; it's there on the coffee table or next to the bed or wherever.
But my prediction is that they, and the people in financing who rely more on trends and crowd-mentality than on common sense and perception, will use the current recession/proto-depression to kill off as many magazines (and newspapers) as possible, unaware of what's being lost in terms of marketing tools, deep pockets for investigative reporting, and personal reader identification with the hard-copy "product."
I hope they are wrong. I hope they are ineffective. But short-sightedness tends to win out.
Anyone want to fund my awesome new magazine idea?