Vantaggi
Opportunity to learn about the publication process. I didn't do journalism in school, so I thought it was quite an eye-opener to observe the processes involved in publishing a magazine - how a story gets edited, how story angles and visual ideas are discussed... The fact that there are proper art meetings to discuss design ideas was quite cool to me.
Svantaggi
Upper management has no clear strategy, and they're so stuck in the past that they're just randomly trying different strategies and hoping something sticks. But in the process, the people suffer. There's an insane amount of work now because writers are all supposed to chase both print and online stories, and it seems like management cares about quantity over quality. When I tried to push back so that I can have a bit more time to do research (as opposed to churning listicles based on superficial info), my editor literally told me "our readers don't care". I was lucky that most of my colleagues were genuinely capable and nice, but I think some other teams have a lot of politics. There's also a lot of bureaucracy, so although there's a fantastic photography/video team, it's hard to get enough resources to do good stuff sometimes. Also, HR is awful. The rank-and-file HR people are okay, but severely overworked. The problem is that at the management level, HR does not actually care about its people. Employees are viewed as disposable and retrenchment exercises are done in the most insensitive way possible.