Hi everyone,
You might have heard the news. Pop-Up Magazine Productions has separated from Emerson Collective and we’re a small, fully independent media company again. I have high hopes for our future. But we had to make some really hard decisions this week.
Our company was born onstage. With a group of friends, we created Pop-Up Magazine, a live magazine—writers, radio producers, filmmakers, photographers, comedians, and musicians perform beautiful, funny, big-hearted stories at historic theaters across North America. Then we launched The California Sunday Magazine, a classic weekend magazine, to cover California, the West, Asia, and Latin America. A few years later, an editor friend told me he’d won $50 in a bet with a colleague that we wouldn’t last two years. Emerson Collective bet on us too, in those early days, and I’m grateful for that. Since then, California Sunday has been a finalist for 14 National Magazine Awards, and won three times. We’ve been a finalist for the top prize, General Excellence or Magazine of the Year, three of the last four years. We won a James Beard Award, a Livingston Award, and back-to-back Magazine of the Year awards from the Society of Publication Designers. We’ve been doing this with a full-time staff of four editors, plus our inspiring Pop-Up Magazine Productions art department.
On Monday, we let our colleagues know that we will have to suspend publication of California Sunday and lay off the editorial team. We announced plans to lay off a total of 11 people, about a third of our staff, across all parts of our company: magazine editors, live story producers, art department, sales, and marketing. This is the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my working life. It was gutting. But California Sunday’s long, deeply reported features and ambitious photo essays are difficult to monetize in the best of times. And like so many live music and theater productions, Pop-Up Magazine has been devastated by the pandemic. We have no idea when we’ll be able to return to theaters.
Pop-Up Magazine Productions will carry on. We’re imagining new ways to do ambitious work online. I’m really proud of Pop-Up Magazine’s upcoming Fall Issue, a week of stories premiering online this coming Monday. And when we can return to theaters, we’ll all stay out late together and appreciate the moment. But for now, our company has to get smaller. When we shared this news with our colleagues on Monday, we asked for a few days so we could reach out to writers and photographers with California Sunday assignments, some of them in the works for a year or more, and send a note to subscribers who make our work possible, and then prepare a public announcement. We were disappointed to see the news released on Twitter before we had the chance to tell our writers, photographers, and subscribers.
Earlier this year, some of our employees told us they wanted union representation, and we voluntarily recognized the guild as their representative. Contrary to what the union is claiming, we disagree that the announcement of these changes to our business, and resulting layoffs, violated federal labor law. We’ve complied with federal labor law and of course we’ll continue to do so.
Before we addressed our colleagues, we sent word of our planned layoffs to the guild’s lead representative and then shared the news with our staff, and asked union members to begin meeting with us as a group as soon as possible to discuss severance. (For union members at any company, severance has to be decided through collective bargaining.) We announced that layoffs will not go into effect for three weeks so we have ample time to bargain in good faith. Our colleagues in the union proposed a time to meet, and we accepted, and bargained in good faith for two hours yesterday morning and another two hours yesterday afternoon. We’re meeting again today. I hope we can come to a resolution soon.
We’ve heard from so many friends and supporters in the last 24 hours. People who appreciate the love we bring to our work at both California Sunday and Pop-Up Magazine and hope we’ll keep doing it for a long time. Thank you all for reaching out. It means a lot.
Doug