Don't forget the photography. I did some of that too!
Editing the magazine and reviewing for the magazine are my full-time job. The odd thing about the UK hi-fi magazines is we relied mostly on full-time reviewers until very recently, and some of the full-timers are still full-timers, but in semi-retirement.
My workload has been prodigious recently, in part because I had to manage the transition from six issues per year (in mid 2009) to 12 per year (by the end of 2012), and find a way of paying for that change (my income is split between time billed for editing and paid-by-the-word writing in the magazine, but anything over about 8,000 words of mine per issue are written pro bono - and I was writing around 16,000 per issue). Now the change part has been approved and paid for, I can reduce my reviewing workload quite substantially and share the love.
The amount of reviewing does take its toll (I'm returning to the roster after almost a month off words) but because the UK magazines demanded full time professionals, they demanded high-speed professionalism from their writers and this has rubbed off. My record prior to last year was 75 capsule reviews in a weekend, so around 100-130 products in a year should be a breeze.
The big issue now is finding all the things I've placed in other people's systems while I was reviewing upwards of 130 products per year. You can't insert that many products into your own system with any degree of reliability or due diligence, so I called in a lot of favours. I racked up a lot of driving from place to place to place and some of those products are hard to track down. Which is why there was a Densen amp that was last seen somewhere just south of Haywards Heath...
