Corporate Knights? Who?
The tidal wave of hype has died down around the apparently unaddressed question surrounding the choice and celebration last week of Brian Mulroney as the "greenest prime minister in Canadian history". The question is "Sez who?" The answer, apparently, is Corporate Knights magazine. And the response to that is, quite frankly, "who?"
Curiously this "Canadian magazine for responsible business" is not listed in Canadian Advertising Rates and Data (CARD), the industry bible that lists virtually every other magazine in the country.
The company's website tells us that the magazine's mission is to "humanize the marketplace" and "connect the dots between marketplace actions and social and environmental impacts." It also claims that it is "the world’s largest circulation magazine with an explicit focus on corporate responsibility" (note the qualification). There are also biographies of co-founder, editor and CEO Toby A. A. Heaps and his team and advisory board.
Corporate Knights also publishes the annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada as a Globe and Mail insert, and the annual Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, announced each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. To do so, it has support from such government agencies as Industry Canada as well as from some of Canada's largest corporations.
The magazine is published 6 times a year to a controlled circulation of 95,500 per issue, 95% of it distributed to selected readers of the Globe and Mail (60% in Ontario, 15% in BC). According to the last audited circulation report (June 2005), there are no single copy sales, although the company claims to put 1,000 copies on newsstands. Another 5,000 go to "CEOs and leading Canadian executives, MPs and senior civil servants, MBA students at the country’s top schools".
If anyone out there knows more about this publication and its bona fides, click on "Comments" below and leave some information.
UPDATE: A quick search flushed out this quote from Mr. Heaps, from a posting on Antonia Zerbisias's blog: "Capitalism is about the best products and the best ideas winning. It's not about using monopoly and oligopoly and subversive pressure tactics. And when capitalism is practised that way, it gets a bad name. It would make Adam Smith roll in his grave."
Curiously this "Canadian magazine for responsible business" is not listed in Canadian Advertising Rates and Data (CARD), the industry bible that lists virtually every other magazine in the country.
The company's website tells us that the magazine's mission is to "humanize the marketplace" and "connect the dots between marketplace actions and social and environmental impacts." It also claims that it is "the world’s largest circulation magazine with an explicit focus on corporate responsibility" (note the qualification). There are also biographies of co-founder, editor and CEO Toby A. A. Heaps and his team and advisory board.
Corporate Knights also publishes the annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada as a Globe and Mail insert, and the annual Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, announced each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. To do so, it has support from such government agencies as Industry Canada as well as from some of Canada's largest corporations.
The magazine is published 6 times a year to a controlled circulation of 95,500 per issue, 95% of it distributed to selected readers of the Globe and Mail (60% in Ontario, 15% in BC). According to the last audited circulation report (June 2005), there are no single copy sales, although the company claims to put 1,000 copies on newsstands. Another 5,000 go to "CEOs and leading Canadian executives, MPs and senior civil servants, MBA students at the country’s top schools".
If anyone out there knows more about this publication and its bona fides, click on "Comments" below and leave some information.
UPDATE: A quick search flushed out this quote from Mr. Heaps, from a posting on Antonia Zerbisias's blog: "Capitalism is about the best products and the best ideas winning. It's not about using monopoly and oligopoly and subversive pressure tactics. And when capitalism is practised that way, it gets a bad name. It would make Adam Smith roll in his grave."
posted by D. B. Scott at
6:00 am
3 Comments:
I have been reading the magazine on and off for a couple of years, and its noble aims and effort are indeed sometimes matched by its product. Not to be summarily written off.
New This Magazine editor Jessica Johnson is most recently Corporate Knights' managing editor.
Corporate Knights is basically its founder, Toby Heaps. He's not a journalist or born salesman, but he's a caring crusader who has created a new category of business/public affairs journalism.
And he's done it pretty much by himself, which is quite remarkable.
Yes, Corporate Knights still looks and reads pretty raw. But the passion shines through every murky, underwritten page.
Toby can always buy the editing, design and sales talent he needs to move the magazine to the next level - and indeed he is doing so already.
But all the fancy hollow-at-the-core consumer magazines published by convergence-minded media giants will never have the heart that Toby Heaps has implanted in Corporate Knights.
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