There's a growing breed of magazine editors who are managing their teams from afar, writes Angus Kidman

Published in The Australian, August 23 2001

The stereotypical vision of a magazine editor is someone at the hub of a centre of activity, directing the work of reporters and production staff.

From within his or her luxuriously appointed office, the editor assigns stories, makes decisions about layouts and perhaps occasionally heads out to a press launch at some swanky hotel.

Magazine editors themselves have done much to create this image. No mass-market title is complete without a gushing editorial in the opening pages, describing what the editor and a few carefully portrayed underlings have been up to in the previous week. Occasionally, the editor may concede that late nights and a few tears have been spent in getting the issue into print, but rarely is it suggested that they are not in complete (and very obvious) control.

There are many elements in that picture that are inaccurate, of course. For a start, editors spend much of their time on far less glamorous pursuits such as arguing with the finance department about budget cuts and being wheeled out to persuade advertisers to take extra pages. And now the very notion of the editor as the visible head of a management team appears under threat.

A emerging trend has been to have editors working in locations entirely removed from other aspects of magazine production. At first glance, this might seem a particularly poor way of running a media enterprise, but those who have tried it can see some benefits.

Matthew J.C. Powell became a "remote editor" in July this year when he was appointed as the editor of Australian Macworld, the only local magazine dedicated to Apple's range of Macintosh computers. A keen Mac enthusiast who had worked as the editor on the title before (under a different publisher), Powell was eager to take on the job, but there was one major sticking point. Niche Media, which produced the title, was located in Melbourne, while Powell was keen to stay in Sydney for both personal and professional reasons.

"I don't think it was ever on the cards for me to move to Melbourne," Powell says. "Being in Sydney is a million times better. One of the problems Macworld has is that the editor is Melbourne-based. The whole Australian IT industry is in Sydney. The profile of the magazine has suffered because there isn't someone in Sydney, and profile is a major part of what the editor does. At the same time, I knew Niche wasn't about to move to Sydney.

"[So] I hoped that we could come up with an option somewhere in between the two extremes."

The solution that was struck was to have Powell edit the magazine from his home in Sydney, while the remaining staff (including a deputy editor, two sub-editors and a layout artist) remained in Niche's St Kilda headquarters. Once a month, Powell travels to Melbourne (where Niche still retains an office for him) for final layout checks, but the majority of his work in visualising and organising the magazine takes place from his home office. While there have been a few teething problems -- the deputy editor took a holiday as soon as Powell was appointed, and he's currently waiting to have a dedicated high-speed connection installed in his house to make connecting to the company network faster and easier -- Powell remains confident that the process will work. "It's going to be great once all the infrastructure is in place," he says.

Indeed, Niche was already well equipped to take advantage of the growing interest in allowing all kinds of staff to work outside the office (according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1.7 million Australians did part of their full-time work from home last year). "The way Niche is set up, it's very friendly to people who want to work remotely. There are already other people at Niche who work outside the office," Powell says. Those people include Macworld's advertising manager, who is based on the NSW Central Coast.

For the most part, Niche's internal network makes no distinction between people connected within the office and those working from outside. "If they weren't set up to have that kind of compromise, it would be difficult."

Powell concedes that even with effective technology, the system has its difficulties. "There's less immediacy to the collaboration," he says. "If there's a problem with the layout, and the designer isn't at his desk, and the page has to go in 10 minutes, I can't rush around the building and find him.

"One other thing that isn't very well set up is the contributor system -- it relies on paper shuffling," he adds. Powell can commission freelancers to write stories, but the official commissioning documents have to be generated in Melbourne, making it hard to get last-minute stories turned around quickly. However, he remains optimistic. "I don't think there's a problem we have that can't be overcome."

A similar approach is being used by T3, a "boys' toys" technology magazine launched in June this year by publisher Derwent Howard. The majority of the magazine's staff are based in Sydney's Bondi Junction. Editor Richard Morgan has a separate office in Sydney's Northern Beaches, a good hour's drive away. That arrangement was in part driven by office space requirements; T3 requires dedicated testing facilities for hi-fi equipment, as well as storage space for other new technologies currently being reviewed.

"I've been a technical writer since 1972, and the setup I've got is pretty good," said Morgan. "To review certain products, you have to have the facilities. You can't test a $12,000 DVD player in a four-by-two room."

As well, constant visits to meet people in the industry mean that even if he did have a permanent office space, he wouldn't be in it often. "I'm out and about quite a lot.".

Morgan admits that working away from other staff on the magazine can have its difficulties. "It's very difficult to develop business relationships with your co-workers." Surprisingly, he doesn't think the advent of technologies such as email had made the process notably easier. "I don't know that it's made that much difference. It's just tools, and before that I'd learnt to work around the problems."

Not every editor wants to take the remote approach, even if the opportunity arises. Burke's Backyard (the spin-off magazine from the television show) is a case in point. While the previous editor largely worked away from the office, current editor Maya Harrison chose to take the more traditional route. "I would prefer to be in an office myself, where people are together and you can discuss things," she says. "But it's a matter of personal preference."

It's probably no coincidence that the most visible manifestation of the remote editor trend has been in titles dedicated to technology. Not only are editors on such magazines more aware of the possibilities for working off site, they're better equipped to deal with the inevitable problems when PCs go wrong. "If I was the editor of, say, Australian Yachting, I probably wouldn't have the same degree of computer knowledge," says Powell.

Some of the technology problems created by this arrangement are quite subtle. For instance, Powell points out that it's important that the computer monitor the editor uses is calibrated to show identical colours to that being used by the art director.

Such issues aside, Powell is happy with his unusual set-up. "Having freelanced for 18 months I've missed the feeling of being part of a team, but I've really enjoyed the freedom. This arrangement is probably the best for me. You get more time to sit back and contemplate. In an office it's a pretty constant environment of distractions."