After the Madison Avenue bubble - Stephen Baker

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After the Madison Avenue bubble posted on July 17, 2009

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I just got up from my desk and took a stroll through these Midtown offices of BusinessWeek. In a matter of months, if someone buys the magazine, we'll be gone. It's terrific real estate. Down by the top editors' offices, the big windows look across the Hudson. The eastern view looks across Rockefeller Center and toward the Chysler Building. These are expensive digs.

It took me a while to get used to working for a magazine that spent money like this. When I first interviewed for the BusinessWeek job in Mexico City, I was working in El Paso, Texas, and making about $17,000 a year. About halfway through my full day of interviews, the chief of correspondents pulled me aside and asked me how much money I would "need" to live in Mexico City. I gave it some thought. A year earlier I'd made about $11,000 in Caracas, and lived like a prince. "About $20,000," I said.

He nodded and walked away.

The view from near my desk, looking toward Times Square

Later I was talking to my only friend at BW, and she asked me if we'd talked money. I told her what I'd estimated, and she gasped. "You should have asked for twice that much!" she said.

Well, in the end they split the difference and still got a cheap guy in Mexico. I moved down from El Paso and they put me in one of the fanciest hotels in Mexico City, the Camino Real. I didn't complain. Then when I found an apartment, they told me that I needed to rent office space for a bureau, too. A bureau? They said I'd have a secretary, and she shouldn't have to navigate my apartment. So I rented another apartment and called it a bureau. (Incidentally, I'm returning to Mexico City for a couple days in mid August to promote the book.)

Looking back, I understand that it seemed vital for BusinessWeek's stature at the time to have formal bureaus, even nice looking ones where sources could come for interviews. It was part of the image of a magazine, one that could command many thousands of dollars for a page of glossy advertising.

Despite my early confusion, it didn't take me long to enjoy these perks. In time, I got sent to Paris, where we had a beautiful office overlooking Avenue Friedland, just a few blocks down from the Arc de Triomphe. Thanks to generous rent subsidies, we lived in a spacious apartment a stone's throw from the Bois de Boulogne. The company paid for private school. It was a good run, and there were lots of great stories to cover.

But in the end, my initial read turned out to be correct. The rich model for a weekly magazine was not sustainable. Those who want to be foreign correspondents today will be lucky to get what I expected: modest pay to work out of their apartments. It will attract mostly young people, which isn't a bad thing. (They might ask more unschooled questions, but they're more likely to move to the action and take chances.) It turns out we rode something of a Madison Ave bubble for a few decades, and now it has popped.

Our Paris apartment

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