Sharks and frogs: why small magazines need
their own pool
The Department of Canadian Heritage, as part of its consultation with the magazine industry about the future of funding (PAP and CMF), requested feedback from a cross-section of the industry. We are grateful to Rosalynn Tyo, managing editor of The New Quarterly in Waterloo, for sharing her excellent and thought-provoking submission. Here are a couple of excerpts:
(If you'd like a copy of the whole submission, send a note to impresa(at)inforamp(dot)net.)
Small magazines are not small because we want to be big but just don’t know how. We are a completely different animal, and I am not sure if we ought even to be forced to compete for funding with the big, consumer titles. The New Quarterly, and arts and literary magazines like ours, resist profitability and marketshare as measures of our overall worth, as we believe that what we do—provide a venue for the development of Canadian artistic talent which later goes on to national and international acclaim—has a high intrinsic value that will likely never be matched by the size of our audience or revenue.She suggests that there ought to be two pools of support (i.e. not having a little literary competing for funding with Maclean's or Chatelaine) and she uses an apt metaphor to illustrate:
We hope that DCH is listening.Profitability is an excellent measure for commercial magazines, because that’s how they measure themselves, and so of course that’s likely how they want all magazines to be measured. Which is not to say they do not also aspire to high editorial quality and providing a real service to their audience – of course they do. I’m merely suggesting that profitability is a more important measure for big commercial titles, whereas editorial excellence/support of new Canadian talent is a more important measure for smaller, not-for-profit niche titles, so we should each get our own formula, our own application process, and our own pool of funding.
The way it’s currently done is like putting a bunch of sharks and a bunch of frogs in the same pool and then having a swimming contest. Sure, it’s not completely unfair -- the frogs can swim, they need to, they like to – but it’s not what they’re designed to do. But if the contest is just open to frogs, doesn’t vertical leap make more sense? Not to mention, having us all in the pool basically makes us…shark food? (Do sharks eat frogs? A sad hole in my science education! Anyway).
(If you'd like a copy of the whole submission, send a note to impresa(at)inforamp(dot)net.)
posted by D. B. Scott at
9:40 am
4 Comments:
It's a *nice* metaphor, but what would the "vertical leap" measurement be? Who published the best poem this year? Would we want DCH deciding this? And, are we so sure that those "sharks" in the pool are hungry for frogs? We must have this debate without presuming that the larger-circ magazines are threatening to swallow the smaller ones. It's just not fair to either category.
To be fair to Rosalynn Tyo, these are only excerpts. In her longer response, she never said that the big magazines are threatening to swallow the smaller ones, only that they take 75% of the available support. She also points out what she would consider reasonable measurements of the leaping: "national editorial awards won,
the success (books published, literary prizes won) by writers whose work we were first (or early) to publish and develop, the grade of service provided to our writers, etc."
So, in the full response, how long does that frog metaphor go on for?
I would also add that Rosalynn Tyo's point was something that was raised in a round-table that I attended -- that is, some "for-profit" magazines suggesting that the markers be commercial success -- which I opposed as the marker for an arts magazine is often based on a different set of values -- and we WOULD be swallowed up if "profit" or "market value" were the only criteria.
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