PRINT MANAGING EDITOR (ANTHOLOGY ISSUE)
We’re looking for an extremely organised project manager to head up operations for our next print magazine, an anthology issue that pairs our favourite articles from the past ten years of Skin Deep with bold new commissions. The Managing Editor is the glue that holds everything together, keeping us on time and on budget, facilitating smooth communication between different teams and throughout each phase of the project, from ideation all the way to distribution. If you’ve got experience overseeing complex creative projects, we’d love to hear from you.
Deadline to apply: midnight Friday 17th May
Interviews: Wednesday 22nd May
The basics:
Job title: Print Managing Editor (Anthology Issue)
Contract type: Fixed term freelance
Fee: £4000
Hours: Estimated average 4 days per month, with lower and higher-intensity periods, to be managed by the job holder
Start date: 6/6/24
End date: 13/12/24
Location: Mostly remote, with some in-person work in London
About Skin Deep:
Skin Deep is an arts and culture organisation working in service of racial justice. For ten years, we’ve made space for Black and POC artists and activists to think beyond crisis and survival, and dream of just futures. We started life in 2014 as a print magazine, and since then we’ve branched out into digital storytelling, live events, and all manner of creative collaborations with fellow travellers on the road to liberation.
To celebrate our tenth birthday, our next print magazine is a special anthology edition. Past issues have explored themes including: PLAY, Is This The End?, Movements, The Food Issue, The Spectacle, and Imagining 2043. Over the years we have published words and imagery from Afua Hirsch, Maya Goodfellow, Otamere Guobadia, Kieran Yates, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Inua Ellams and Shabaka Hutchings, and featured interviews with the likes of Gary Younge, Barry Jenkins, Nida Manzoor, Riz Ahmed, Nubya Garcia and Travis Alabanza.
About the anthology issue:
Our next print magazine is a special anthology edition that draws together ten years of learning, creating and collaborating at the intersection of racial justice and culture. Presenting the very best of our previous issues alongside bold new commissions, it doesn’t just look back, but resonates with what matters right now and imagines into the future. Our aim is to zoom out beyond the decade we’ve been active, and consider the question of how long things take to really change. What is ten years in a fight for racial justice that spans centuries? How do we pace ourselves in times of urgency? How do we reach through time to learn from our ancestors and teach our descendents? As always, the magazine will be beautifully designed and thoughtfully edited. It will speak to a broad audience of new readers, as well as to our beloved core community who have been with us for years.
About the Managing Editor role:
This is an operational role. Your job is to make everything run smoothly, from the first brainstorm all the way through editing, design and production to the launch party, distribution and impact. You will run the budget and schedule, ensure good collaboration and communication between different teams and across the different phases of the project, help to solve problems/put out fires when needed, and keep a constant eye on our objectives to make sure that we’re meeting them. You will be CC’d in to everything so you have a birds eye view of what’s going on and can catch balls before they drop. Essentially, you are in charge of the train reaching its final destination in one piece.
You will be ultimately accountable to the Creative Directors of Skin Deep, and will work closely alongside the Editorial Director and the Design Lead / head of Design Studio. You will coordinate the Comms Lead, Distribution Producer, Impact Producer, and Launch Party Producer.
Key tasks:
- Manage the editorial, design and production schedule, coordinating with writers, editors, photographers, illustrators and designers to ensure deadlines are met and content is delivered on time
- Manage the print budget, keeping it updated with actuals and ensuring we don’t overspend
- Take care of all the paperwork (contracts, invoices and receipts) and maintain a neat and accessible google drive for the project
- Oversee all internal communication (email and discord) to maintain a bird’s eye view of the entire project
- Organise – and take part in – brainstorms, commissioning meetings, pitching meetings, feedback meetings, read-throughs, production meetings and any other team gatherings as needed throughout the process
- Coordinate with the printers to ensure smooth and timely delivery of the magazine
- Work closely with the Launch Party Producer, keeping an eye on their budget and schedule, enabling smooth communication between them and the rest of print team, and supporting them to ensure a successful event that launches the magazine into the world
- Work closely with the Skin Deep Comms Lead, keeping an eye on their budget and schedule, and supporting them to ensure a successful promotion campaign for the magazine across our digital platforms
- Support the Distribution Producer to ensure that the magazines are getting where they need to go and our stock is being carefully tracked
- Support the Impact Producer as they devise and deliver a small impact campaign that uses the stories in the magazine to create additional opportunities for change in the real world
- Work with the print team – and the Skin Deep core team – to set objectives at the start of the project and work to ensure that they are being met
- Manage recruitment process and on-boarding for print team roles (with support from Skin Deep’s Organisational Development Leads)
- Anticipate and solve problems as they arise, particularly around scheduling, capacity, or miscommunication
- Help to set the tone for the print team’s working culture, centering care and prioritising wellbeing.
Print team role matrix:
Who we’re looking for:
We need someone with a proven track record of delivering complex multi-stage creative projects. Ideally, at least some of this experience will be with editorial projects – some familiarity with producing magazines will be a big advantage. But ultimately, we just need an amazing project manager, so we’re open to hearing from people with transferable skills.
You can confidently manage a project budget with accuracy and transparency, and you can help others manage smaller budgets within your overall budget.
You are meticulous – tracking every penny, chasing down every contract and invoice, keeping clear records, filing every doc in the right place.
You must be a clear, confident and kind communicator, equally able to deliver warm words of encouragement and hard-to-hear feedback as needed. You’re adept at helping people find a compromise when they’re at a stalemate. You are able to tailor your communication style to ensure that you are understood by people with different needs.
You’re a problem solver – and ideally a problem avoider. Whether it’s a capacity crunch, calendar clash, technical difficulties or “artistic differences”, you keep a cool head in a crisis and work collaboratively to find a way through any roadblock.
You understand Skin Deep, our mission and our values. You believe in the role that cultural production has to play in movements for racial justice. You want to work in an organisation dedicated to decentering whiteness and dismantling white supremacy in everything we do – not just in the what but also the how, not just the external work we put out into the world but the internal processes as well. You understand the importance of collective care and rest as resistance, and are committed to breaking patterns of capitalist, ableist ways of working. You are excited to be a part of, and help shape, a working culture that centres care, creativity, liberation and justice.
This role will require flexible working and the ability to be responsive to team members working on different days of the week, so is best suited to someone who is a full-time freelancer or otherwise has lots of flexibility in their other work.
How to apply:
Send your CV and a short covering letter to apply@skindeepmag.com. Please put ‘Print Managing Editor (Anthology Issue)’ as the subject line.
Your cover letter can be written (no more than 1 page or 500 words), or a video/voice note (no more than 3 minutes).
Here’s what we want to know:
1. What experience, skills and approaches would you bring to this role?
2. Which part of this role most excites or inspires you?
3. Why do you want to work at Skin Deep?
If you have any questions on the role or the application process, or need any information in an alternative format, please email apply@skindeepmag.com
Deadline: Midnight on Friday 17th May
Interviews: Wednesday 22nd May (optional in-person or virtual)
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