Are tight budgets actually a good thing?

There's no doubt that the glory days of magazines — complete with limitless expense accounts and personal drivers — are long gone thanks to the recession. The glitz and glamour immortalized in movies like Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic are more fictional than ever. Brandon Holley, the former editor of Jane, knows this firsthand.

Holley now runs Yahoo's Shine, a rapidly growing website for women, and in a NYT profile, Holley describes all of what she left behind in the ritzy pre-recession magazine world. Some of the best are outlined after the jump.

• When she was the editor in chief of Jane, Condé Nast’s [now-defunct] monthly for young single women, she had a big office in the company’s Times Square headquarters, a driver and a lavish expense account. She sat in the front row at the Paris and Milan fashion shows. She was invited to fabulous parties by Hollywood publicists. Sometimes, a stylist did her hair in her office while she was on the phone.  
• She once dispatched what she calls “crazy photographers and insane stylists” to Aruba and commissioned lengthy articles from investigative journalists. Now, she spends much of her time trying to figure out ways to get Shine’s visitors to contribute their own unvarnished thoughts on the site by blogging and posting reader comments.
• She used to relish going to work with her sharply dressed employees in Midtown Manhattan. Now, says Ms. Holley, who lives with her musician husband and toddler son, she spends much of her day in her nightgown, communicating with her staff almost entirely via instant messages. 
• Yet the Hollywood press agents who wined and dined her when she was at Jane seem to have lost her telephone number. “It’s almost like I’m in hiding,” she said. “Nobody calls me anymore.”   

Ed misses the days when he didn't feel nervous expensing a lunch, but what if this bare bones approach is really a better strategy? Maybe more Edsters would be able to find (and keep) jobs if they worked in their pjs every now and then, because companies would have more money to spend on new hires. On the other hand, industry workers are so notoriously underpaid that Ed wonders if the perks help boost morale for whippersnappers who work long hours for little pay.

What do you think, Edsters? Is this the direction women's magazines are heading? Would you still be interested in working for a glossy without the glitz?