There are a couple methods to getting a magazine out the door on time every month. There’s what I call the “ABC” (Always Be Closing) method where the various sections are staggered, heading to production over the course of an entire month, which in theory sounds like a sane way to do it but in practice feels like you never let off the gas and makes it nearly impossible to take vacations or do anything besides ship pages. And, no matter how hard you try there always manages to be a couple all day marathons to ship pages at the end. The other method I’m calling “look everyone this thing ships in two weeks we really need to buckle down if we’re gonna make it,” where you smash the thing out in a week or two right up to the deadline putting in long hours and generally working as hard as you can in a sprint to the finish. Sounds bad in theory but is not too bad in practice because there’s a couple weeks of slacking in between the all-out efforts. But, you know who really gets hammered in this arrangement? The production department. So, the solution has always been to give everyone fake deadlines (I’m not really blaming them as they always seem to stay till 5am on closing week shipping pages).

Whatever method you’re using the fake deadlines are usually a conspiracy between production and the managing editor–who also tries very hard to hide those 5 week issues from everyone–so we don’t completely check out for awhile. One place I worked they had a fake thing they called “the early form” where they duped everyone into thinking they were printing parts of the magazine early. Problem was those parts were totally random which makes no sense whatsoever if you know anything at all about printing magazine forms.

The game for me was to figure out the real deadline and on occasion when a photographer I really wanted to work with needed more time, give it to them. I think some of the more stressful points of my career where those days after the fake deadline had passed and the managing editor, editor, creative director and production department were asking me for the film and I had to come up with an excuse everyday and thinking to myself “If this shoot fails, I’m definitely fired.” I certainly don’t think it was good for my health but I couldn’t resist when a photographer I wanted to work with said they couldn’t do it without a few more days to deliver final art.

So, what’s the drop dead date? Well, that depends on who’s asking. Photographers always get a couple extra days.

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16 Comments

  1. Didn’t David Mamet write “ABC” (Always Be Closing) in Glengarry Glen Ross?

    ;-)

  2. Back in my magazine staffer days my darkroom was down in the production department. I would ask Dan, the production manager what I could finish first for him to do his work. My editor on the other hand wanted me to finish another section so that it would cover the fact that she was late with her stories. I like Dan more so he normally got what he wanted.

    The lesson I learned from this was to always plan the month so that people are waiting on someone else.

  3. I don’t believe in phony deadlines, for two reason:

    1. Sooner or later everyone will realize the deadlines are phony and then ignore your deadlines.

    2. We are professionals and we are not turning out High School yearbooks. We are paid to make magazines. To use a quote by Joe Lewis I use often:

    “To be World Champion means that you show up at 9 P.M. on Wednesday and fight.”

    Truthfully, I know many people at all levels in magazine that do not meet this criteria; and of cause the higher the level in management the greater the chaos they can cause.

    Perpetual closing doesn’t work for a monthly, though for a weekly it would work. Also its hard to close edit if advertising is still selling ads; and you are crazy to try and shut down ad sales.

    I do believe a publication needs different deadlines for different parts of the publication; you need a flow. BIG lumps costs money and cause mistakes. Production, copy and research should not have down days. Everyone in the magazine should be working on multiple issues.

    All editorial dates are set off of press due dates, which are set a year before – another discussion on how accurate those dates are. You need to decide how many proofs from the engraver you need [an average] and then back off from the press due date. This will give you your close dates; the days you will actually ship pages to the engraver. The press due dates should not dictate the internal due dates. You need to sit down and decide which part of the magazine should have early deadlines and which late deadlines. The deadline for the early text should be early enough that production, copy and research are still working and the previous issue. Again, NO DOWN TIME.

    I do not ship pages to engraver until ‘Ship week.’ We get them to a final state and they sit in my room.
    There are more details but I don’t think its that interesting to none production people.

    We rarely work until 10 P.M. most late night now are 8 P.M.

    As for finding time for emergencies, if you flow a magazine properly you will have the time.

    BTW I am a production flunky.

  4. This shows up in the ad agency world too. As digital becomes more commonplace, and photographers become retouchers and stay in the loop much longer than ever before, I am seeing this more and more. You get the call from the agency that they have decided the final frame will be “123456.tif”, and you get the frantic email that the ad MUST ship by tomorrow night. So you drop everything, process and retouch the file, FTP it or Fedex it, and then four days go by, and you think all is well in AdLand, and then the next frantic email comes in, wanting a head swap with an adjacent frame, and “can you open up the shadows a bit?”, and then the required next email that states that “the ad MUST ship by tomorrow night”.

    After you get about a dozen of those scenarios, you begin to remember that childhood book about “The Boy That Cried Wolf”, and your attitude begins to sour a bit, knowing that you’re being lied to.

    After about a dozen more of those emails, you start the search for a post-production house to hand this stuff off to, to remove yourself from their problems. It’s like being on the clock 24/7, always waiting for that next panicked email.

  5. The deadline game is always a hard one. I found some issues were smooth sailing. But sometimes, one or two shoots would be up against that deadline and I would be pushing to get film in and pushing my staff to get all their research done etc. Than what would happen, the film and folders of images would sit and sit with no print order in sight. Finally, I would get a print order and again it would be rush rush rush . I always felt like I ended up looking like the idiot. I finally had to ask the managing editor to put me into the “real” date mix so I was aware of how to manage the situation better. By doing this it took my stress level down and we ended up saving on all the “rush charges”!!! It also allowed me to be more honest with the photographers I was working with on our timing needs.

  6. #4

    Absolutely. Just starts to pall in the end doesn’t it.

    Especially when you know that once your end is over – after you’ve busted your ass getting files out of the door, stayed up ’til 2am two nights running, forgotten to walk the dog, eat and ignored your wife – you’re history.

    You’re so history that when you call after 90 days to see where your payment is, Tracey in accounts says “Uh, we only do payment runs on the 3rd Thursday after Lent”.

    Photographer’s deadlines don’t count when it comes to money..

  7. The problem with photographers becoming retouchers is that many do not supply hard proofs. Without a hardproof there is no way for anyone to know what exactly the photographer-retoucher wants.

    Its can be very difficult to supply hardproofs when you are working on something against deadline and you’re in another country. What looks good in RGB on a photographer’s monitor may not translate well to CMYK on a high speed web and without a hardproof I will be lost on how to translate the digital file, and be forced to go with my [actually my QC person and designer’s] vision of the digital file.

    AS drop dead dates: rarely are dates so droop dead that something can’t be done to get some extension from the printing plant. Printing plants will do everything in their power to make a job successful – meaning print at the contracted quality and on time.

    I’ve had my pages taken away from the press and another job printed to give me extra time without extra cost to prepare pages in an emergency. This means that the dropdead date I gave changed but not that I lied.

  8. I’ve run across these types of deadlines in many aspects of the business world. They seem at times to be just pulled out of a hat. What I try to get out of the person supplying this “fake” deadline is this, “Do you want it done or do you want it done right?”.

    This has helped in getting a more true deadline.

  9. ‘Round these parts, we definitely slack off for the first week after our last release date, then hustle the days leading up to shipping. Makes me wonder how hard those people who work at bi-monthly/quarterly magazines work.

  10. wow, i’m actually pretty surprised to read about fake deadlines- at the all-volunteer magazine $pread (www.spreadmagazine.org), we don’t even use faux dates to inspire folks. and that’s dealing with sex worker authors and shooters, not professional writers and journalists!

  11. Fake deadlines? You mean like the one that the photographer your assisting thinks the airline has for rolling the plane away from the gate? Or the real last drop off for Fed-X, or the real last
    drop off for the last run of E-6? Ah, so it was YOUR fault I had to eat Chinese food at midnight?

  12. I worked at a weekly and it was never ending. And production had a 3am night every week. It didn’t matter what “deadlines” we made, it always ended up the same. Everyone on down the line was waiting, with people on the clock all night long waiting, and waiting…

    It’s not much different in any business. Everyone’s always late on ad deadlines, payment deadlines, etc. I had a friend who would be flown around the globe for a huge automotive supplier with a team on chartered jets, picking up parts from factories around the world in a rush to get them to headquarters by “next week.” Inevitably all the parts would sit in the hallway for months until he was told to get rid of them.

  13. Fake Deadlines? I guess this might be considered a case of Life imitates high school.

  14. Ah yes the ol’ fake deadline ploy.

    In my other life as a senior art director in advertising it was something us creatives dealt with all the time. And still do. According to ancient sea scrolls found in the recesses of Ogilvy & Mather or maybe it was Grey – the fake deadline was invented and perfected as an art form by junior account executives looking to impress their superiors in order gain promotion and advancement by getting work from creatives to clients well ahead of the actual deadline. In fact so impressive was this technique that it quickly spread up the ladder so that senior level people began to promise work (and new business pitches) to clients well ahead of schedule. And thus the standard two week turnaround for an ad assignment in 1984 is now a twelve hour turn around in 2008. If that. Okay, computers and such have led clients into believing ideas can be delivered faster than ever before as well. But the point remains that the fake deadline has been around for a while and like the cockroach, will survive Armageddon. Sigh.

    Just one of the reasons I left full time advertising.

  15. You would think it would finally catch up to them, and their ploy would be exposed. Several times, I wanted to say, “Hey wait a minute, you’re ordering a color correction and head-swap on the same frame that you ordered four days ago, but at that time, you told me the ad was going to press the next night? How can that be? They’re holding the press for ME?”

    You would think that, after a while, when you were told “Wednesday is the drop dead deadline”, you’d immediately (internally) reset that deadline for Friday, at least inside your head.

  16. @14 Steven

    I agree, I think that’s the true origin. It all starts at the lowest level of the account team with each consecutive level adding a day for their CYA cushion. Then … once it hits the creative side it all starts working backward; each level of creative takes off a day until the photographer is hired with less that 2 days to complete the assignment. The true owner of the calendar is often so enigmatic that no one really knows until it’s discovered that the insertion date was missed by a week, in which case last months ad will do just fine.


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