Shaking it Up at Condé Nast

4 Times Square, the Condé Nast Building

If they can’t pay their regular employees, chances are, they won’t return to paying their interns anytime soon.

Yesterday, I spoke about Pamela Noel, he director of career services at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and Jim O’Brien, the director of career services at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, each of whom expressed concerns about an increasing number of journalism internships becoming unpaid.

This morning, I woke up a New York Observer piece,“McKinsey Proffers Pie Graphs: Several Condé Mags to Cut ’25-ish Percent,'” which as may be evident from the title, shares more bad news.

Over the summer, Condé Nast called in McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s premiere management consulting firms, to help restructure its empire. Several months later, McKinsey has delivered its budget targets for 2010 to publishers and editors. Details, Traveler, Glamour, Gourmet, and Teen Vogue are on the short list of publications that will be asked to cut budgets by roughly 25 percent next year.

No one’s telling the head honchos at individual mags where to make these cuts but, layoffs are looking inevitable. Particularly at those publications not meeting their ad targets, frequency may be cut. While perhaps practical from a business perspective, this wont solve the industry’s problems.

If one of the great problems with magazines is that they are obsolete by time they hit newsstands, how can we expect a smaller staff AND less issues to make magazines profitable again?

The only good news to come out of this? There are no immediate plans to close any titles.

Will these magazines, and their continually shrinking editorial staffs demand more from their interns, all while withholding wages, or even a stipend? In the long run, will interns be expected to wear more and more hats – those of freelancers, assistants, and fact checkers – without financial reward? Will they agree to these terms?

I wish I had the answers. But, like those struggling at 4 Times Square, I only have a slew of questions.