Attention, struggling freelancers: James Truman, the editor most responsible for morphing magazines into caption-driven catalogs, is looking to do some actual journalism. There's only one catch: You'll have to work for pocket change.

The former Condé Nast editorial director—who fled the city in 2004 for what was billed as a life of Buddhist-inspired chin-stroking abroad—has been busily working the phones recruiting writers and photographers for his latest launch, Culture + Travel.

According to multiple sources, Truman's new boss, zany Canadian billionairess Louise MacBain, has given the impish trophy editor a comically tiny budget for the title, which is unironically aimed at "high-net-worth patrons of the arts," and set to debut September 24. (Not that MacBain's stingy about her own needs: We're told she hired pricey fashion photographer Steven Klein to take her publicity photo, and keeps a massage therapist on 24-hour call at her vacation home in the Hamptons.)

Several would-be collaborators who've met with Truman or EIC Michael Boodro say they were told the budget for such travel-mag basics as photography and, um, travel, is more Let's Go!, than Lucky. "When I went there, he kept telling me they were very, very poor," says an editor who was approached.

Truman, who is on record admitting he misses the days when Si Newhouse paid him $2 million a year to oversee the cafeteria's feng shui, acknowledges the budget for Culture + Travel is wee, but insists the pay scale for freelancers is competitive. "What we're paying writers is not dissimilar to what competing travel magazines pay," he says. But those writers, for the most part, aren't being bought plane tickets. Rather, they're asked to write about the places they live or have traveled. "It's not like we have a staff of writers being sent around the world," Truman says.

And while Culture + Travel may feature a lot of pick-up art, it's not a totally no-frills place to work. There will, for instance, be a launch party, at MacBain's Manhattan home. Considering the magazine has a staff of six, we can't imagine it will be much of an imposition. Massage, anyone?