By Zoe Smith
Time magazine has refused to reveal how many layoffs are planned at
its London offices as the major international business magazines
struggle in a difficult market.
Against a weak advertising climate in the US and the increasing
threat of the internet, Time invited UK editorial staff to take
voluntary redundancy earlier this month, while Newsweek cut staff and
BusinessWeek and Forbes closed their international editions outright
last year.
Michael Elliott, editor-at-large at Time, said it
would be unfair to staff to reveal how many redundancies were required
in the UK bureau, but added: “We’re trimming, as everyone knows.
At the end of the process we will have what we have now – a full editing operation in London.”
Stryker
McGuire, Newsweek’s London Bureau chief, said: “We’re all adjusting to
advertising realities, but fortunately Newsweek has been able to adjust
well.
“We can cover Europe with the staff we have and we’re also
trying to make better use of our part-time staff, not only in the
London office, but also around the world.”
He said the London
bureau had lost just one member of staff, despite the fact that the
circulation of the magazine’s international edition was 475,000,
compared with 3.1 million for the domestic edition.
BusinessWeek’s
London bureau has been in operation since the mid-1970s, but the
magazine announced the closure of its international editions last month.
Stephen
Adler, the title’s editor-inchief, said: “We are taking this action to
harness the growing power of the web globally and to serve readers and
advertisers in a more timely, efficient and targeted way.”
Time,
the largest magazine publisher in the US, is also looking to redefine
the way it uses new media. Elliott said: “In the last few months our
foreign correspondents all over the world have been putting stories up
on the internet as soon as they break in a much more systematic way
than in the past.
“We realise that as a weekly magazine you can
be weekly in print, but you have to be more immediate than that on the
web. I think 2006 is the year when all of us will have to take the
internet 2.0 seriously.”
Forbes, which closed its global editions
last summer, has been devoting increasing resources to developing its
internet presence, and is now producing web-only copy as well as
looking at moving into mobile content.
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