Lisa Beyer at UT

I wrote this article as a class assignment for my feature writing class. Thought some of you guys would enjoy my sarcasm. I have mixed feelings on the subject that I am writing about, mostly after a bad expereince with her in New York City, but overall she is an enjoyable lady. Enjoy:

While being the managing editor of TIME magazine, Lisa Beyer found time in her busy schedule to fly back to her old alma mater of the University of Texas and speak to eager young journalism students. In this travel, Beyer spent an hour in Dr. Burd’s feature writing class on Wednesday, Oct. 4.

After being the editor of The Daily Texan in 1983, Beyer received a scholarship that she claims was her “golden ticket” to travel to Hong Kong and write for AsiaWeek. After investigating the government on issues of torture and detention without trial and publishing a series of articles, she was expelled and escorted out of the country, only to find herself at TIME magazine in New York.

Beyer became the Jerusalem bureau chief in 1991 for TIME, and won several awards on her reporting. Returning back to New York in 2000, Beyer moved editor positions from the Society pages to Foreign Affairs, and now the Nation section.

Beyer claimed that she had made the journey back to her roots at UT several times, but this time she came to learn about what is occurring with our generation. She said that she playfully commented to the head of the school of journalism, Dr. Lorainne Branham, that she cannot even comprehend what it is like to be in her position with the low application rate and small percentage that actually pursue their major.

In response to students who are living in the state of journalism, Dr. Branham said, “They’ll be the ones to solve the conundrum today.”

With the current confusion of the media towards magazines, Beyer said that is fearful of the future and was interested in the feature writing class’ opinion on what they read and what media they consume. In her day, they were always afraid of what the computer would do to print media. She said that even before the advent of the Internet, there was always talk about consumers reading floppy disks of books and magazines.

“Last year, advertisers have lost confidence and interest in advertising in print, even though we still have four million subscribers,” Beyer said. “With things being online, no one knows how to work with it and make a successful business model.”

Beyer talked about how the newsgathering business is extremely expensive, especially when you consider how much it costs to run different bureaus around the world, and with less advertising, the magazine is being forced to cut back on their costs, which many times affect their reporting.

“TIME magazine is an institution,” claimed Beyer. She commented that now they have to reinvent their magazine to make it profitable. Whether this new TIME means more opinion, more analysis or more factual stories, Beyer said that the magazine is trying to find their voice in the very cluttered media.

A student in the classroom who is studying journalism and also pursuing the Texas Media sequence in the advertising department perked up when Beyer asked for questions.

“What are the emotions in the Time Inc. building with the recent decision to sell off several magazines, including Popular Science and Field and Stream?” the student said.

“What set those magazines apart is that they did not have an online strategy,” Beyer said. “They were sold so that the company can invest more resources in the publications that are successful on the web.”

Beyer commented that TIME magazine is always under pressure to cut costs when they really cannot budget without starting to affect the product, and she hopes with selling the 17 different Time Inc. publications will allow more financial investment into the magazine.

When asked by another student if the magazine’s content was ever affected by advertising, Beyer’s face squinted and she said “sometimes.” She said that she has never seen anything in print that was directly affected by advertising.

But, with hesitation, she said that it is hard to find an advertiser that wants to be next to a story about the war on Iraq because they do not want to be associated with death and destruction. However, many advertisers want to be next to a softer story that is perhaps associated with their product.

Beyer gave the example of heart news. She said that one month they would produce a great article about research on the heart that medical advertisers want to be next to and pay a premium to have product placement next to such a story. A year later, the ad sales team will ask the editorial to write another article about heart news because last year was so successful with advertising.

“When I was the editor of The Daily Texan, I would have been furious. I would have told them to screw it and we would write any story besides heart news,” Beyer said. “Now that I am older and realize that this is a business, I usually just give in and assign the story.”