AMPA sets example for Mag Awards

The awards presentation at the Alberta Magazines Conference Friday afternoon went off smoothly at 3:30 p.m. in a reception room at the Carriage House Inn in a distant section of Calgary known (rather dauntingly to outsiders) as “the South East.” Colleen Seto, executive director of AMPA (known to AMPA members as Little Blessing), climbed onto a chair in the middle of the room and called for attention; Gary Davies of Avenue Magazine, president of AMPA, presented the awards in rapid order, applause erupted at intervals, and a tall photographer in gleaming white running shoes that resembled life rafts floated over the carpet to capture the smiles and handshakes for future historians. The raffles for the IPOD and the GPS device went off without a hitch and to more well-earned applause. No more than half an hour was required; the wine drinkers returned to their chat and the mood remained celebratory, friendly, even hectic. It was all over in another forty-five minutes and it was still daylight. Among the assembled celebrants there was no sign of peevishness or the exhaustion that one associates with Other Magazine Awards; nor was anyone heard swearing off ever attending one of these things again.

At lunch that day, Al Zikovitz gave voice in his keynote speech to the question on everyone’s mind. “Where do we go, what do we do?” he cried, and, by way of reply, proposed that it’s time “to stop running after circ, and start running after readers,” a sentiment endorsed by many in the room who nodded their heads vigorously. “I may be sleeping better than many of you,” he went on to say, “because ad revenue at Cottage Life is only 39% of total revenue.”

Speakers at the convention were treated to dinner in a posh restaurant offering a ten-ounce steak special that “starts at forty dollars,” as the server expressed it, “and goes up in $2 steps for each two-ounce increment.”