Staffing in News Titles | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 13, 2006

The Week, which has enjoyed large circulation growth and explosive ad page and revenue increases, employs no writers per se. Rather, it relies on a team of 20 or so editors to parse through the news of the week from various sources and compress them into bite-sized nuggets.5 It is largely parasitic.

How does this effect staffing? If you open a copy of The Week and count everyone in the staff box — from editor in chief through circulation manager and on to UK founding editor — you would come up with a grand total of about 40 people.6 If you count just the people on the editorial side of Time you get about 240, and at Newsweek about 185.7 That difference has potentially enormous implications for the future of news weeklies.

Perhaps because it is a new model, The Week is in some ways designed to thrive in the current media culture. As other titles cut staffs to get costs in line, The Week with its success would seem to be on the road to adding people. The question is, would more staff actually improve the magazine considering how it’s put together or is the magazine’s small staff adequate? Would the quality investment instead be in newsgathering technology, as we see in Google News? (See Online Newsroom Investment.)

What it comes down to is what each staff provides the reader. There is clearly more original reporting in Time or Newsweek than there is in The Week. The stories in Time and Newsweek are longer and have a lead at the beginning, a nut graph up high and a short kicker at the end. But in terms of providing readers with a summary of the news of the last seven days, The Week arguably offers more. In some ways The Week is a post-Internet print news creation. It operates as something like a weekly print Web log, minus the attitude. It takes advantage of the media that exist and simply serves as a filter for the reader — here’s half a page on the Iraqi Constitution, complete with left and right opinion; here’s a paragraph on the FBI easing drug restrictions on applicants. It is a news source for busy people in a world that’s getting busier, and it can do what it does cheaply.

One large question hangs over the approach of The Week, however. If its staffing model were to become the one that other titles to follow, which organizations would gather the news and provide the original content?

Heading into 2006, at least, most news weeklies continued to report, and largely held the line on staffing and bureaus in 2005. Again, though, that assessment was made before the cuts at Time, which was in the low double digits.

News Magazine Staff Size Over Time

Time and Newsweek select years 1983 - 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism from magazine staff boxes

To get these staff measurements, we take the mastheads the magazines themselves provide.

It might seem at first as if Time’s staff took a big drop in 2005, from 290 to 264, but much of that can be attributed to this report’s re-evaluating how it counts the staff in Time’s box. Some of the employees of Time’s side projects like Time for Kids and Time.com were removed from the count to make it more comparable to the way Newsweek counts its staff. By this measure, Time’s staff count is really down 14, with several of the cuts coming in a reorganized photo department.8

Newsweek added four members to its staff — two more reporters each in its London and Jerusalem bureaus. This marks the second consecutive year that Newsweek added staff to its editorial team. This increase, though small, may indicate that the magazine is devoting more resources to reporting rather than just rewriting or offering “takes” on current events.9

Overall, both Time and Newsweek added staff in their various bureaus in 2005 — before the Time cuts. The way they did so, however, suggests different priorities, or at least different ideas of where their needs lie. Even before its December layoffs, Time decreased its foreign bureau staff by two, while increasing its domestic bureau population by three. Newsweek went in the other direction, cutting its domestic bureau staff by one, increasing its foreign bureau numbers by four.

At the same time, both of the biggest news weeklies cut the number of bureaus they have in the field. Time closed its bureaus in Sydney and South Africa , though the South Africa Bureau was arguably redundant given that the magazine had and still has a bureau in Johannesburg. The closures bring the total number of bureaus Time has to 25, from 27.10

Newsweek’s bureau count went from 21 in 2004 to 20 in 2005. The magazine shuttered its bureau in Dallas and its “foreign” bureau in Miami (the magazine also has a domestic bureau in Miami with a different reporter assigned, and that bureau remained open), but opened a bureau in Hong Kong.11