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To operate, magazines must spend money on resources essential to their business, such as development of content (including staff writers’ salaries and freelance writers’ fees), desktop-publishing technology needed for designing and laying out each issue, production (which includes paper and printing costs for print versions of magazines and IT-related costs for online-only periodicals), sales and marketing, and distribution (including postage for printed periodicals).

Content Development

The lifeblood of any magazine is the editorial department, which produces the periodical’s content, excluding advertisements. Like newspapers, most magazines have a chain of command that begins with a publisher and extends down to the editor in chief, the managing editor, and a variety of subeditors. These subeditors oversee such editorial functions as photography, illustrations, reporting and writing, and copyediting. Magazine writers generally include contributing staff writers, who are specialists in certain fields, and freelance writers, self-employed professionals assigned to cover particular stories or regions. Many magazines, especially those with small budgets, also accept unsolicited articles from freelancers to fill their pages—often paying the writers a flat fee or an honorarium in return for their work.

Production

A magazine’s production and technology department maintains the computer hardware and software necessary to design each issue of the magazine (that is, to select typefaces and styles) and to lay out the issue (place the text and graphics together on each page spread). Staff or freelance subeditors specializing in design and layout are often assigned to these tasks.

A small newsletter or magazine can be launched quite cheaply with the use of computer-based desktop publishing, which enables an aspiring publisher/editor to write, design, lay out, and print the publication or post it online. Yet despite the rise of inexpensive desktop publishing, most large commercial magazines still operate several departments, which employ hundreds of people.

Production costs also include paper and printing for those magazines published in print format. Because such magazines are on a weekly, monthly, or bimonthly publication cycle, instead of daily, it is not economically practical for their publishers to maintain expensive print facilities. Instead, many national magazines digitally transport files containing their print-ready issues to regional printing sites for the insertion of local ads and for faster distribution.

Sales and Marketing

Magazine publishers must also maintain a sales force and a marketing staff to focus on increasing subscriptions and attracting more advertisers. These professionals’ responsibilities might include gathering and analyzing subscriber data to see who’s renewing their subscriptions (and why) and who’s letting their subscriptions lapse (and why), as well as designing marketing campaigns to attract new readers.

Distribution

Magazines also have to spend money on distribution. This function includes maintenance of subscriber mailing lists, postage for shipping published issues of print-version magazines to subscribers, and possibly fees for displaying and selling published issues through newsstands or at supermarket checkout lines. This is an area where online versions of magazines have an advantage, although hosting, maintaining, and promoting an online magazine introduces its own set of new distribution challenges (see “Converging Media Case Study: Print, Web, and Synergy”).