[DIV id=headline] [H2]Time up for Canuck staff[/H2]
[DIV id=author] [P class=byline]JAMES ADAMS
[P class=source]From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
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[DIV id=article style="FONT-SIZE: 100%"] The Canadian edition of Time magazine is laying off its only full-time Canada-based reporting staff and drastically reducing the number of Canadian freelancers it uses to meet demands, it says, from readers who want more international coverage.
Writers Steven Frank and Leigh Anne Williams, both based in Time Canada Ltd.'s only news bureau, in Toronto, were told last Friday that they would be losing their jobs at the end of April.
Their departures are part of a larger convulsion orchestrated by Time Inc. headquarters in New York. Last Friday it announced it was laying off 250 U.S. jobs this spring, in addition to the shuttering of 205 positions announced late last year.
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The Toronto-based weekly will still bear the slug "Canadian Edition" on its cover and carry Canadian advertising, but its Canadian editorial content will be severely curtailed. Time Canada's publishing director Joan Brehl said yesterday that the Canadian edition will continue to have a Toronto-based editor who will oversee coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, the annual Canadian Newsmaker of the Year story and the annual Canadian Heroes issue, among other features. Canadian reportage will be done on an as-needed basis by Canadian-based freelancers and Time staffers in the United States. The sales staff of five will be kept on, although two employees in advertising production are to lose their jobs by the summer.
"It's what the readers want," Brehl said, noting that the "Canadian press is [now] covering Canada thoroughly on a week-to-week basis." As a result, "our editorial strategy has changed. . . . We're going to be beefing up and extending our global coverage for Canadians."
Since Time, which has been published in Canada since the 1940s, was "grandfathered" with Reader's Digest several years ago under the Foreign Publishers Advertising Services Act, Canadian companies will still be able to claim 100-per-cent deductibility for taxation purposes if they advertise in Time's Canadian edition. Thus, if Ford Canada were to hypothetically pay $35,000 for a full-page, full-colour ad in Time Canada, it would be allowed to reduce its taxable operating costs by that amount.
William Shields, editor of Masthead, the bible of Canada's magazine industry, said yesterday that Time's retreat from Canadian coverage is "something of a curiosity at a time when Maclean's is reinvigorating its Canadian coverage." At the same time, "it makes some sense," he said. "Time was never leading in the news game in Canada. They did some good stories, but they rarely broke them." Losing two-full time staffers is a cost-saver, he added, and "maybe they're taking a page out of The Economist's game plan by focusing on global-minded business executives and policy-makers."
Time's Canadian edition remains one of the country's most successful magazines. According to figures released recently by the Print Measurement Bureau, it enjoyed an average of 11.5 readers per issue in 2002-2005 on a paid circulation of almost 240,000. Last year Masthead gave it a fifth-place ranking nationally for its performance in 2004, when it earned an estimated $28-million, including almost $19-million from advertising.
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