By Hamutal Dotan

Photo by jzakariya from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
News media has been having a rough go of it lately. In the past week alone, the Canadian edition of TIME magazine announced that operations would cease this month, Rogers cutbacks forced Maclean’s to lay off several staff, and Sun Media said that it would be cutting 10% of its workforce—about 600 employees—in the near term. This is on top of substantial cuts made earlier this year at Global and Canwest and in an economic climate that is proving increasingly harsh for print in particular.

TIME Canada has been in print for more than 65 years, though the proportion of Canadian editorial content it includes has been diminishing since the 1970s. Two years ago Time closed down its Canadian news bureau entirely; this most recent announcement means that the Toronto ad sales office will also be shut and its seven employees laid off. According to their press release, from now on Canadians “will be served by TIME’s U.S. edition… and [by] TIME.com, which is becoming an increasingly important part of our international offering, and which we expect to maintain its terrific recent growth.” The closure is part of a company-wide restructuring: Time, Inc. announced last month that due to declining advertising revenue (predicted to continue through 2009), it would be laying off as much as 6% of its staff worldwide.
At Sun Media the story is much the same: a substantial cut in the workforce compelled by harsh economic circumstances and the pressure of selling news that is also often available for free online. Said CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau: “We need to build a presence and build our brand in the digital universe, and we need to do it as quickly as possible. We have to let customers get the information they want on the platform of their choice.” No specific plans for this have been issued to date, and the details of which staff members will be let go are not yet clear.
In the face of all this doom and gloom comes a perhaps surprising article in the Star describing the magazine industry as “optimistic.” Though advertising revenue is down, readership is up slightly, and according to Magazines Canada CEO Mark Jamison, a previous surge in advertising revenue (which grew strongly from 2000 until 2007) means that the industry is able to sustain a few hits and come out the other side. What is clear is that both newspapers and magazines are, for the moment, living through troubled times and trying to figure out how both the economy and the internet will impel them to reimagine their activities. We’ve always known this was coming—stories about the death of print have been around as long as the web has. What’s changed is the growing sense of urgency: under economic pressure, the industry is attempting to reshape itself much more quickly than it ever has before. The future, it seems, is here.
Image of TIME magazine cover courtesy of Time, Inc.