Familiar theme

The mags that still exist tend to operate with skeleton crews doing loads of unpaid overtime and minimal resources. They find cheap ways to fill pages, e.g. Red Bull were a fantastic free source for spectacular sporting images as long as you credited them properly. They cleverly repackage their own old material and often buy stories from overseas in bulk - sometimes even changing the names/places/cultural references to imbue a local feel.

For a period, I freelanced on a famous music title that had been reduced to a staff of three. The little red light on my desk phone was constantly blinking. The passcode must have been written nearby because I soon discovered the message bank was FULL of enquiries. I started jotting down the details in a notepad until the editor told me not to bother. They'd given up on answering. They couldn't worry about stuff like that and get the next issue out.