I had taken the day off, but when the email came through on my phone alerting me to an “important meeting” the following day, I knew the dread I felt was shared by my coworkers back at the office. We had all watched the media landscape over the past couple months and seen magazines bigger than our own fall under the immense weight of their debts, their inabilities to attract sufficient advertising dollars. And we all knew we were no better. Our bottom line had been bleeding since long before the current economic disasters. Tell-tale signs had arisen over the months: Subscriptions were cut from 12 months to six, our circulation base was cut by at least a third and control of our website had slowly slipped from our fingers.

So, the following day, it was with a mixture of surprise and, well, non-surprise that I listened to the company president’s voice over the conference phone say, “We are selling Scuba Diving magazine to World Publications (the publisher of our number-one competitor, Sport Diver), and the office will close on Friday, two days from now.” All just a week before Christmas.

I was one of the lucky (I suppose) few offered a “opportunity” to go with the magazine and the new owners. The offer, in short, was that I would keep my current salary and title, and within a reasonable time, I would have to move to Orlando and help with whatever it is they plan to do with the magazine. Considering that no one could give me more than an ethereal explanation of what that plan would be, and even less about my actual responsibilities with the new incarnation, I was not terribly inclined to accept.

My ultimate decision and counter offer is one I have contemplated often over the holiday vacation still in progress. I indicated that I would be willing to “help with the transition” as a contract writer. My win-win reasoning being that the new owners could avoid hiring a new employee for a publication they have yet to establish a long-term plan for, and I could avoid opening myself up to an unlimited workload and an uncertain level of responsibility in a city with a higher cost of living, all for no change in my salary. Simply put, if the middle ground is accepted, I get to maintain some control over my workload, while commanding a reasonable rate of pay for myself. If this best-case scenario actually works out, I suppose I could come out just as well, if not better off, than I was as a full-time editor. I could devote a finite amount of time to Scuba Diving, and pursue new freelance work as well. But that remains speculation until all the cards are on the table. More to come…