Staff exodus hits S.F. Magazine
Most of San Francisco magazine’s small editorial staff gave notice or quit their jobs this week.
The monthly publication won a prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence this year. I tis owned by Modern Luxury of Atlanta, which publishes more than 30 other city magazines including one in Silicon Valley. The company also publishes wedding and interior design titles.
Earlier this month, staffers in San Francisco were told there would be unspecified budget cuts and that the magazine would begin sharing content with other Modern
Luxury titles. “We hadn’t done that before,” said Lindsey Smith, the magazine’s associate editor. Smith said she gave notice Thursday and is leaving at the end of next week to pursue a freelance career.
Senior editor Scott Lucas said on Twitter Thursday that he will be leaving when the December issue is finished.
Erin Feher, style and design editor, posted on Facebook Friday, “I QUIT MY JOB. Like box-up-my-desk-and-bounce-kinda quit.”
Jodi Nakatsuka, photo director, said she resigned Friday. Articles editor Ian Stewart confirmed that he also gave notice.
Former staffers believe only two full-time editors will remain, including Jason Sheeler, who started this week as editor in chief. There are a handful of part-time editorial staffers, but some are independent contractors, not employees. The exodus did not affect the magazine’s advertising staff. The slick magazine is still stuffed with ads; its September issue weighed in at 156 pages.
Publisher Paul Reulbach did not return phone calls. Modern Luxury Editorial Director Stephanie Davis Smith did not return an email seeking comment.
Jon Steinberg, the magazine’s editor in chief until mid-July, said, “Since I left, there have been whispers and then rampant discussion of them laying off most of the staff anyway.” Employees “see the writing on the wall and are quitting.”
While employees are being paid, Steinberg said “the parent company has been been egregiously delinquent in paying freelancers for about a year now. Every single day, I was being bombarded by frustrated freelancers I had hired who were supposed to be paid within 45 days of publication” and had been waiting up to 180 days. “We had copy editors who were full-time freelancers, who hadn’t been paid in two, three, four months.”
San Francisco freelance writer Laura Fraser said she started an “all-out campaign” after payment for a story she did on mountain lions was 120 days late. She wrote to Modern Luxury’s chief executive and chief financial officer and copied the letter to 120 colleagues at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a co-working group. She also posted about her travails on social media. She said she finally got paid Sept. 5, more than five months after she sent an invoice.
Steinberg said that in mid-2017, Modern Luxury acquired its biggest competitor, Greengale Publishing. “They almost doubled in size overnight. Ever since then, they took on so much overhead and new expenses that they hadn’t planned for.”
Fraser said San Francisco magazine pursued serious journalism under its previous editors, making it “an outlier” in the Modern Luxury stable. Its other publications focus on interior design, “the best doctors” and other subjects “that pull in a lot of ads.”