BoSacks Speaks Out: The Lost Magazine Journeyman: Memoir of a Vanishing Production Floor
By Bob Sacks
Tue, Aug 12, 2025

I came in through the freight entrance. Not metaphorically, the actual back door, where the air was thick with ink, solvent and adrenaline, and the hum of the presses was less romantic than relentless. I didn’t start as an editor. I started as a production manager, thrown into a world where chaos and precision danced a nightly tango. One misaligned plate, one jammed bindery, and months of planning could vanish in the time it takes to curse and reload.
My education was immediate and unforgiving.
I will say one of my greatest skill sets since I was a newbie was that I never panicked, but stress taught me plenty, but mentorship taught me more. The veterans, hands mottled with ink, voices honed by decades of deadline combat, didn’t coddle. They corrected. Bluntly. Decisively. It was an apprenticeship built on bruises and breakthroughs. You learned by screwing up in front of someone who’d already screwed up better. And if you were lucky, they let you try again.
Mine was a crash course in logistics, improvisation, and the sacred art of crisis management. I learned the rhythm of deadline, the way a late shipment could unravel a week’s work, the quiet genius of a press operator coaxing a stubborn machine back to life, the pride that came from shepherding an issue from chaos to completion. I belonged to a tribe that understood every page was earned, never given. Respect wasn’t granted, it was proven, usually at 3 a.m., with sweat and stubbornness.
That messy, magnificent relay of knowledge, the journeyman’s pipeline, is now sadly gutted. The numbers are grim. Adweek reports that 20–24-year-olds make up just 6.5% of the advertising and PR workforce, down from 10.5% in 2019. That’s not just a workforce shift, it’s a craft collapse. Once, publishers like Condé Nast took raw talent and shaped leaders through proximity and pressure. I watched rookies become editors, production assistants become lifers, all through the slow burn of earned judgment.
But the culture changed. Where I once saw newcomers absorbing the tempo of the floor, now I see dashboards and Slack threads. The feedback loop born in midnight jams and close calls has been replaced by checklists and metrics. The improvisation, the instinct, the human calibration, it’s all being flattened into process.
I think often of Meredith, once Dotdash Meredith, now People Inc. , gutting 143 positions in early 2025. My mind doesn’t drift to org charts; it drifts to the production teams. The quiet heroes who kept the machine running. Now, just one slender bridge remains: a handful of apprentices from Iowa State and Drake, placed at Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, Travel + Leisure. They’re learning not just software, but the sound and feel of the presses, the rituals and mistakes that build real professionals. Each year’s dozen apprentices feel like embers in the dark, barely enough to promise a flame.
I started in local news at my local paper The Express. Local papers were the old farm team for magazine talent. There, production was hands-on, lessons were visceral, and feedback landed deeper for being immediate and raw. That pipeline has dried up. Over a third of American counties lack a full-time local reporter. More than half of newspaper jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020. My luck, stumbling into a live network of mentors and sweaty print rooms, feels unrepeatable.
Even the middle has been hollowed. When Time magazine axed 22 jobs in editorial, tech, sales, and studio in 2024, trailing 30 more just months prior, management blamed shrinking ad budgets and digital unpredictability. But what’s really lost is operating wisdom. Not just editors and creatives, but production people who know every workaround, every deadline disaster, every move that turns a jammed press into a miracle. The chain of improvisation and judgment is severed every time another veteran walks out the door.
Say what you will about AI. It can crop photos, flag typos, even optimize a production schedule. But it can’t teach the muscle memory that comes from living the madness of closing night. It won’t rescue a late shipment out of pure force of will. It doesn’t laugh at the gallows humor in a room where the bindery just failed five hours before print. And it can’t impart the judgment you only accrue in moments of real consequence. My greatest inheritance, instinct under pressure was forged in noise and mess, not modeled in a spreadsheet or prompt.
What magazines need now isn’t just smoother content or glossier upgrades. They need a rebuilt pipeline. Paid apprenticeships that last long enough for the weight of the job to settle into your bones. Rotational programs that force young hires to grip every step of production, from raw file to final page. Leaders willing to fight for inefficient, essential roles simply because they transmit the craft.
Everything I understand about leadership and problem-solving was passed down from production lifers who prided themselves on precision and resilience, not just speed. My knowledge of this industry, my instincts, my opinions, my ability to lead and provoke, was only made possible by the mentorship I received from the generations before me. This newsletter is my ledger, my way of giving back. It’s not just commentary, it’s repayment. A tribute to the bruised hands and sharp eyes that shaped me.
I mourn the journeyman generation slipping through our fingers, the production managers, press operators, bindery teams whose memory defined the craft. If we fail to act, magazines may stagger on as slick shells, but stripped of the muscle and memory that make them truly alive. The real tragedy won’t be the death of print. It’ll be the forgetting of everything that made the job matter.
So I have to ask: where did your skillset emerge? Was it handed down in the heat of a deadline, shaped by someone who barked corrections and then quietly showed you the trick that saved the day? Were you mentored, truly mentored, not just onboarded or trained, but taught through repetition, failure, and proximity? Did someone take the time to pass down the muscle memory, the judgment, the gallows humor that lives only on the production floor?
Because if not, if your expertise was built in isolation, through dashboards and asynchronous feedback, then maybe I’m not just mourning a generation. Maybe I’m mourning a way of knowing. A way of becoming. And maybe that’s the real loss.
Am I exaggerating? I hope so. I hope I’m wrong about the future of our industry. I hope there’s a new pipeline forming somewhere I can’t see, quiet, resilient, ready to surprise us. But from where I stand, the scaffolding that held us up is crumbling. The journeyman path, the slow, bruised, beautiful climb from apprentice to master, is vanishing. And with it, the kind of leadership that knows how to improvise under pressure, how to teach without condescension, how to protect the craft even when the margins are thin.
If you were lucky enough to learn in the noise and mess, then you know what I mean. And if you weren’t, if your education came clean and digital, then I envy your efficiency, but I worry for your depth. Because this industry was never just about content. It was about consequence. And the people who taught me understood that every page was a promise, every deadline a test, and every mistake a chance to pass something down.
We don’t just need new talent. We need new elders. And we won’t get them without rebuilding the ladder they used to climb.