This is a plan that only Here Media could hatch: Fire your entire editorial staff, let your editor-in-cheif set up another company using the same staff only this time as free-lancers, save magazine
This is a plan that only Here Media could hatch: Fire your entire editorial staff, let your editor-in-cheif set up another company using the same staff only this time as free-lancers, save magazine (for a while) cut overhead in the process.
Out Magazine, whose parent company Here Media (owned by Regent Entertainment) is still unwinding from legal trouble, appears to have gone along with an idea designed by Aaron Hicklin its current editor-in-chief to save the magazine. Hicklin who ran Out for the last six years and Here Media have agreed to spin off their editorial staff into a “shell” staff, otherwise known as free-lancers, to be hired by Hicklin in his new venture called Grand Editorial. Grand Editorial will be a content provider cooking up “unique” editorial to publications and corporations (i.e. mini magazines, inserts, advertorials). Their first and only client so far, Out/Here.
Hicklin’s Grand Scheme Editorial press-release reads:
I’m thrilled that Here Media, Out’s parent company, sees the value in this exciting new initiative. I’m profoundly committed to Out’s ongoing evolution, and beyond happy to be able to continue doing what I love best while also having the opportunity to explore new ways of thinking about the relationship between editorial and publishing.
I got a few questions pertaining to this story:
1) If the Out editorial staff wasn’t spun off into a new company, would Out mag have folded?
2) Was Aaron Hicklin canned, but managed to swing a contract out of Here to keep the magazine and his job going?
3) Here is already notorious for (not) paying free-lancers, what are the chances this relationship survives?
What’s that saying about lip-stick on a pig?
