Magazine Deadlines: A Look Inside a Magazine Production Schedule

Magazine production is a business that works over time, and magazine producers live a working life that is entirely based on a constant series of constantly evolving and moving deadlines. But unlike newspapers that focus on day-to-day news as it happens, and then move on to the next news cycle in a few hours, magazines take longer to produce, so their lead times are also longer. .

First, the editorial staff will produce an annual summary of the issues, including the themes for the cover, columns, and articles to be included in each issue, and suggestions for artwork, photos, and graphics. The advertising and marketing team will then be in charge of creating ads. They will typically take a copy of the magazine and show it to potential advertisers such as merchants, retailers, or others, and then based on the number of ads they sell, managing editors will determine how many pages the magazine can afford. .

The various articles will then be assigned to the writers, and they will also be given a deadline to deliver the finished articles. And they will be told how many words the articles should be, so that everything can fit on the allotted number of pages, including photos and advertisements. Photographers will be sent out to take pictures for the magazine, graphic artists will maintain the layout for the entire issue, and eventually it will end up packaged and ready to go to print.

The production schedule for many magazines means that articles will be written three months or more before the date they are to be printed, so writers should take this into account. If you’re writing about a winter sport, for example, you’ll need to keep that in mind, even if you’re writing it in mid-July. Similarly, photographers will need to take photos that are not out of the ordinary when the magazine finally hits newsstands and readers open it. This may also mean that the topics covered need to be researched a year in advance, so that they are appropriate for a particular season of the year. But if they contain urgent information, it may need to be inserted last, just before the article is printed. For example, this year you could write a food review for a restaurant that will open next year, but the location’s phone number won’t be known until next year, just before the magazine goes into production. So these kinds of challenges are part of the strategy and planning that are part of the production of the magazines that we see every day.