Big assistance for big publishers
The recent conference in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association and Magazines du Quebec, called Creating Canada, had a number of objectives, apparently: among them to get the post office to be more reasonable; if necessary to get the federal government to pressure Canada Post to be more reasonable; and to safeguard and (perhaps) to enhance the current federal postal subsidy.
Much of that subsidy (63%) goes to large companies for whom publishing is a relatively small part of their business: Publishing is a significant, but relatively small part of the printing empire that is Transcontinental. Rogers is part of a huge wireless and cable empire. TVA is part of the Quebecor Inc.
An analysis of the Publications Assistance Program (PAP) shows multi-title publishing groups are given the majority of the $38 million that is made available to paid circulation consumer magazines. This makes sense in many ways -- these companies publish so many titles and have such a huge share of total circulation.
(There are also some curiosities, such as the fairly large subsidies given to religious publications such as the Catholic Register, Anglican Journal and United Church Observer. Sceptical minds might enquire whether such publications are mere house organs, largely unread by non-adherents; it must also be nice to have tax exempt property and a cheque from the government to disseminate your views.)
Here is the latest published data on grants given out to some publishing groups by PAP as of April 2004. Imminently, the government will be deciding how much money Canadian Heritage will have to give out this year.
Much of that subsidy (63%) goes to large companies for whom publishing is a relatively small part of their business: Publishing is a significant, but relatively small part of the printing empire that is Transcontinental. Rogers is part of a huge wireless and cable empire. TVA is part of the Quebecor Inc.
An analysis of the Publications Assistance Program (PAP) shows multi-title publishing groups are given the majority of the $38 million that is made available to paid circulation consumer magazines. This makes sense in many ways -- these companies publish so many titles and have such a huge share of total circulation.
(There are also some curiosities, such as the fairly large subsidies given to religious publications such as the Catholic Register, Anglican Journal and United Church Observer. Sceptical minds might enquire whether such publications are mere house organs, largely unread by non-adherents; it must also be nice to have tax exempt property and a cheque from the government to disseminate your views.)
Here is the latest published data on grants given out to some publishing groups by PAP as of April 2004. Imminently, the government will be deciding how much money Canadian Heritage will have to give out this year.
| Groups | Grants | % of total grants |
| | | |
| Transcontinental | 9,084,499 | 24 |
| | 8,449,091 | 22 |
| Reader's Digest | 2,401,522 | 6 |
| House & Home Media | 1,288,631 | 3 |
| TVA (Quebecor) | 1,250,154 | 3 |
| | 864,884 | 2 |
| | 419,609 | 1 |
| Quarto Communications | 134,374 | 0.4 |
| | 23,892,764 | 63 |
posted by D. B. Scott at
9:05 am
2 Comments:
The principle is that the postal subsidy is not for publishers' gain, but for the readers.
By helping to minimize Canadian publishers' cost to MAIL the magazine to Canadian subscribers, the expectation is that those publishers won't need to charge their Canadian subscribers as much as they otherwise would.
From that standpoint, it's largely immaterial whether the firm responsible for producing and disseminating each magazine is a large or a small publisher. Either way, a higher postage cost would be likely to result in higher cost to the reader.
However, it is for this reason that I find it somewhat questionable that "request controlled" circulation was deemed worthy of a slice of the PAP pie (a pie that refuses to grow with inflation). Helping controlled publishers keep their selling price at $zero is not as readily understandable.
I understand that the postal subsidy has always been presented to the public as a subsidy to the reader; sometimes it has been characterized as a support for literacy.
Implicit in this principle is to suport delivery of content, reading material, text and pictures (what have you) into the hands of the end user. Since large companies like Rogers and Transcontinental routinely produce publications that are 40 - 50% advertising then the PAP is dispropotionately being used to deliver non-editorial content -- advertising, in other words.
I have never seen the calculation done, and don't know if it COULD be done, but it would be an interesting to see what the result would be if the number of edit pages mailed determined the proportion of the mailing cost subsidized. Does a small literary, with no advertising to speak of, get less of a subsidy now than an ad-heavy magazine like Chatelaine?
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