An Industry At Issue
The post-pandemic future of magazines looks as bright and glossy as ever.
Graduating college brings with it a complicated set of emotions. Pride in your accomplishments, anxiety about the future, and grief that comes with saying goodbye to your friends are all common ones. But last spring, all Samantha Berlin felt was anger.
When the pandemic hit, colleges across the country shut down their campuses and sent as many students home as they could. March froze for the college seniors waiting in their childhood bedrooms, nervously wondering how the semester would end. When Syracuse University made the decision to cancel in-person graduation for the class of 2020, Berlin reached her breaking point. “I felt cheated out of not walking across the stage at graduation,” she says. “I just felt very lost.” As spring melted into summer, Berlin found a job at LADYGUNN magazine, and things got better. But the transition from full time college student to full time remote employee did not come as easily as she had hoped.
Over the past year, the pandemic has revolutionized the way we work. Without warning, the number of Americans who worked from home shot up from 20 percent to a staggering 71 percent. Companies needed to adapt quickly, and magazines were no exception. For the first time ever, issues were published without anyone present in offices. Editors had to invent new ways to conduct photoshoots and other stages of the production process that rely on in-person collaboration. We even invented a new word to describe the spreading of misinformation related to COVID-19: infodemic. Now, as publications are starting to think about when employees will be allowed back in the office, it’s more important than ever for the magazine industry to learn from its remote work mistakes to ensure a seamless reintegration process for all involved.
Paul Kita is a food and nutrition editor for Men’s Health. He started working remotely a year and a half ago, after Hearst bought the publication and he was offered the option either to work from home or to transfer to their New York office. That year and a half’s worth of experience proved invaluable once the pandemic started, as Kita watched his coworkers around him adjust to the remote work lifestyle he’d already been living.
Once everyone was on the same level playing field, however, Kita noticed that his day-to-day didn’t change much. Writers quickly thought up new, COVID-conscious story angles, pitches kept flowing in, and articles continued to be published at about the same rate. He was also happy with how Hearst handled the switch, in terms of letting employees decompress. “I’m not going to receive or be expected to have Slack on when my family’s home,” he says. “That’s not something I had before,” when New York magazine culture dictated long work days and an always-on mindset.
Paul’s wife, Meghan Kita, is the managing editor for Muhlenberg Magazine at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She says in-person collaboration was a hallmark of her position when she first arrived. “I was told that when I was hired,” she says. “We’re in the office 8:30 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, that is how it works, and working from home is not really a thing.” So she was also pleasantly surprised when her entire team shifted online almost effortlessly. Some coworkers, she says, had to get creative and find new projects to work on, like sports writers. Without live matches to cover, they switched to audio and started up a podcast. But as a whole, her newsroom continued on, almost as if nothing had changed.
One key adjustment Meghan made was instating a revamped editorial strategy to match what was happening (or not happening) on Muhlenberg’s campus. Post lockdown, Meghan says the magazine is switching to stories that cover what’s next. “Now, it’s like, the situation isn’t new anymore,” she says. “How are we going to get out of this and what are the lasting effects going to be, even when we’re not all wearing masks and social distancing anymore?” This forward-thinking coverage has helped her plan out future issues and fill sections in the magazine that used to report on live events and entertainment.
For younger professionals, diving into remote work culture with only a few months of office experience to guide them wasn’t so straightforward. Annie O’Sullivan, an editorial assistant on the Special Projects Team at Good Housekeeping, says the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities was particularly difficult for her. In the beginning of the pandemic, she noticed she was overworking herself, between checking her Slack notifications at all hours and grappling with creative burnout. However, once her boss reassured her that she didn’t need to be constantly available, O’Sullivan found a better balance between work hours and home hours. Lately, she’s noticed that it’s been harder to communicate with her coworkers and that Zoom is wearing her out: “I crave in-person interaction now more than ever,” she says.
That craving, along with the Zoom fatigue O’Sullivan describes, was exponentially worse for young adults in the industry living alone. One 2021 study found that the extended isolation brought on by quarantine and lockdown guidelines impacted both young people’s emotional well-being and their ability to relax during their leisure time. Ideally, a return to the office and interactions with coworkers will bring with it a return of stability for amateur and veteran journalists alike.
McKenna Moore is an assistant audience engagement editor at Fortune magazine. She loves the flexibility working from home provides, including midday workouts and the lack of commute. While she misses the hectic bustle of a workday in downtown Manhattan, she says that, as a journalist who was used to stepping out of the office to interview people, her job never really involved being chained to a desk. “We kind of, before this, already had a situation where we were trusted to make our own decisions about where we needed to be to do our work that day,” she says.
The biggest obstacle for her was trying to figure out how to stay active. Without her daily walks to the subway station and around the office, Moore noticed that the occasional venture outside wasn’t cutting it anymore. “I am not old enough to be feeling like my body’s breaking down,” she says of her realization that her office chair at home was actually hurting more than it was helping. Stiff joints aside, Moore says that the hybrid model Fortune is considering adopting this fall is only on the table because employees put it there in the first place — which bodes well for work-from-home enthusiasts everywhere.
Conversely, for entry-level journalists, the shift online brought with it a steep and often frustrating learning curve. Berlin, now the editorial director at LADYGUNN, says working out of her parents’ house was the last thing she envisioned her newly-graduated self doing. “No one ever says, ‘what are you doing the day after you graduate college?’ And I never thought about that,” she says. Last summer, Berlin embraced her situation and made the most of a remote lifestyle. For her, the epiphany came when she realized she didn’t need an apartment in New York City or a wildly impressive resume to have the career she wants. “I can literally do what I want to do and interview the people I want to interview at my dining room table,” she says.
Another 2020 Syracuse graduate, Allison Ingrum, currently works remotely as an editorial operations specialist at POPSUGAR. Ingrum says starting a new job online was intimidating, since it was harder to learn the company’s norms and expectations. But she’s also met more people than she would have working in the office, since now she’s in meetings with coworkers on different coasts. For Ingrum, mastering the ins and outs of Zoom was particularly nerve-racking — “the first time you present your screen is awful,” she says. Still, she says getting hired over the summer meant that POPSUGAR had already solved many of the issues with remote work before she arrived. With POPSUGAR tossing around a potential date for employees to return to the office sometime this fall, Ingrum says she’s equal parts nervous and excited for the mundane milestones that mean she finally fits into a workplace, like getting a key card and sitting down at her desk for the first time.
Unlike industry professionals, collegiate magazine staff members are beholden to their campus’ resources, which created plenty of impediments for students studying from home. Sarah Everett was the editor-in-chief for Vox at the Missouri School of Journalism for almost all of 2020. While Vox was still able to put out monthly issues, Everett says it was particularly difficult for off-campus students to access InDesign through the school’s server. “It just took a lot more time because we had to wait on technology,” she says.
Since the magazine’s production is part of a class, Everett didn’t have to worry about staff turnover or getting funding from the school. But, as the campus slowly began to repopulate, she says there was “more collaboration between fewer people” to accommodate social distancing and a slightly condensed production timeline. Her biggest challenge was finding events to cover, since a large portion of the magazine relies on restaurants and entertainment to fill its pages. She says her editorial strategy changed mostly to “what should we be recommending for people to do right now? Is it safe? Is it going to be outside?” Looking back, she’s proud of her team members and Vox’s advisors for pushing through less than ideal circumstances.
Haley Robertson is the co-editor in chief of Baked magazine at Syracuse University. She says it took her most of the fall semester just to fill out the paperwork to have the school re-recognize her magazine as a campus publication, which in turn pushed back production more than she would’ve liked. This spring, the newly-reinvented magazine’s first issue is being published, thanks to a large staff Robertson and her partner, Amy Nakamura, assembled from scratch. Robertson says she uses Slack to communicate with her writers, editors, and photographers and credited PowerPoints screen shared in Zoom meetings with helping her train everyone in a short amount of time. But as proud as she is of her fellow students, she says she misses the comradery and socialization that come with hustling to finish an issue. “I haven’t met half the staff in person,” she admits.
Before the world rushes to embrace the new normal of post-pandemic work, it is essential that we understand what worked for employees at home and what didn’t. In the magazine industry, remote work experiences fractured into different setups that varied in their levels of success. It’s likely the same pattern will appear with hybrid work models in the near future, as companies and their employees create a new list of priorities together. As the great work from home experiment concludes, the magazine industry has proven that it owes much of its success over the past 12 months to the unwavering tenacity of its journalists.
Domestic Bliss
Five quick and easy tips for separating work from home while working from home.
- Make a dedicated workstation for yourself, provided you have the funds and the space. If you can’t, at least make an effort to get up and get ready every day. (Meghan Kita)
- Download two separate Internet browsers for your computer. Use one just for work and use the other for everything else. (Allison Ingrum)
- Don’t enable Slack notifications on your phone, if you can help it. (Annie O’Sullivan)
- Set boundaries for yourself and avoid answering coworkers’ messages late at night, unless it’s an emergency. (McKenna Moore)
- Use emojis next to your name in Slack to let coworkers know whether you’re online and available to respond to them right away. (Allison Ingrum)
Dear Past Pandemic Self,
If you could give some advice to your old self during week one of the pandemic, what would you say?
- “Be kind to yourself and know that you’re doing your best.” Haley Robertson
- “Everything’s a learning experience, and also what’s meant to be will be.” Annie O’Sullivan
- “You can adapt.” Audrey Morgan, assistant editor at Food Network magazine and The Pioneer Woman magazine
- “It’ll all work out, and everyone’s lost.” Samantha Berlin
- “Taking a break on Twitter when you’re working from home is stupid.” Meghan Kita
