Pros
If you're fresh out of college and need a brief gig to pay some bills and make your folks get off your back, this could work, provided you can endure the cons.
Cons
Psychologically toxic work environment. This is a family owned business run by an octogenarian boss who exhibits verbally abusive and outrageous behavior toward his employees on a daily basis. A third of the staff are uncommunicative family members who come and go as they please and are completely acquiescent to the boss’s methods. The non-related employees are there only out of some personal financial necessity. At first, everything will seem fine while you get situated in your new position and receive some basic training. Then it’ll start. The boss is a nanomanager and will scrutinize everything including lavatory and coffee machine best practices. If you make any error, however trivial, you’ll become the recipient of humiliating and abusive insults, threats, curses and vicious put-downs—for all your co-workers to hear. You’ll be blamed for failing to remember or do things that you didn’t have knowledge of in the first place. Although it’s a good quality magazine and well known in the industry the published rates are intentionally very high, enabling the boss to give “special discounts” based on how much money he thinks a company can spend. If you work in editorial, you’ll be a hack re-phrasing old material but with new dates and quotes. But the writers have it a bit easier. Advertising sales is a journey into oblivion. You'll get the very worst of the boss. For new business the remaining pool of qualified clients is narrow, and you’ll have to compete with a few other magazines that have a larger circulation and much better rates. You’ll never see your commission. The company makes most of its money by annually reloading large, old accounts that are all handled by the boss and another family member. You’ll be maintaining relations with small existing accounts that were generated by previous sales reps. You’ll be acquiring clients from the competitors, a tough gig since marketing departments buy once a year. You’ll be googling new business and leaving endless voice and email messages. If you’re professional, persistent, and above all, lucky, you’ll make sales. It won’t take a lot of accounts to cover your measly base, because clients typically sign ad orders for the rest of the year. So make money for the company and the boss becomes happy, right? Wrong. The boss will keep you around until you get enough orders to cover your base salary up to that point and some profit—then cut your position for some false or exaggerated reason and your accounts will go to the next rep who's hired. Oh, and when you’re first hired you will be given some bs story about how the previous rep left for some dramatic personal reason, and you’ll be instructed to tell the clients that same thing in case they ask why their account executive suddenly vanished.