April 9, 2009 (99/365)

Tomorrow will be my first day back at the magazine since they quartered my hours (same as all the other "casual" workers, except the 4 unlucky bastards who got canned). It's a little like going to a social function that you know a freshly-ex'ed girlfriend is going to be at. Uncomfortable. Not that I didn't know this was coming. Even before the sales department started coming up short, I realized this was a print publication and was therefore 99% likely to be doomed. (In the roshambo of publishing, Internet beats Paper.) The Powers That Be have, unfortunately, hastened its demise by not fully understanding what it is they're printing. If this were any other magazine, what they did would make financial sense. They cut production from biweekly to roughly monthly or even bimonthly. The detail not fully appreciated is the fact that this is a nursing placement magazine (interspersed with light articles) instead of some normal special interest-rag. No hospital nor doctor's office is going to want to pay to run an ad that no one's going to see for a month when they have an open job now. Counter-intuitive as it might sound, what they needed to do was bump the book to a weekly, print one national issue (they currently print a dozen regional versions), lower the price of ads, and pump the fact that we're showing more ads more often now. Did they consult me? No. If they had, I'd have grown the largest, brassiest pair of balls in the house... I'd have told them to publish more, not less, and that they needed to pay me more for my scintillating insights.