The mystery of Global Brief magazine

The decision by the Canadian International Council to pull the plug on its planned flagship publication Global Brief immediately after its first issue, raises more questions than it answers. An article in the Globe and Mail on Saturday suggests that the CIC and its multimillionaire chair Jim Balsillie were startled by the cost of producing the lavish, perfect-bound magazine. The magazine had a masthead staff of 9, including editor Irvin Studin and well-known art director Louis Fishauf. (Editor Studin can be seen in a video promotion of the magazine's mission.)

The Globe story focussed on the abrupt resignation of Hugh Segal as the executive vice-chair of the board and said it was the result of a dispute over the costs of the magazine.

“CIC has decided that given the current climate with regard to print publications everywhere, we will not be proceeding with another print issue at this time,” said [CIC spokesperson Neve] Peric.

The board worried the project would become a huge money drain, people familiar with the decision said.

“This is not the time to be launching another print publication in Canada. It would be like opening a buggy whip operation after the car was invented,” one person close to the foundation said.

Nobody in the story explains how a group of high powered business people were so blindsided. Was there no budget? No business plan? Was this longstanding objective being run as a rogue operation within the CIC? Apparently the Council had provided about $200,000 in funding so far and it seems bizarre to suggest that they didn't know how the money was being spent. Or that it would have had to be subsidized long term by the Council (its projected controlled circulation was 6,500 and a full page ad was $1,500.) It had all the earmarks of a vanity publishing project, rationalized as a prestigious brand-builder for the CIC.

The magazine features a roster of erudite policy pieces – the issue's editorial said it is in the same vein as Foreign Affairs or The Economist – and is printed on heavy, high-quality paper, a cost Mr. Studin dismissed as negligible. He said the project has a “strong public interest component,” pointing to a high-profile roster of contributors for its first issue, including Louise Fréchette, John E. McLaughlin and Alexander Downer.

An interesting perspective on the debacle is provided in a blog posting by David Olive, a Toronto Star columnist and former magazine editor (Report on Business magazine, Toronto Life).

Especially with journals in which Canadians are telling uniquely Canadian stories to fellow Canadians - a rare sight on our newsstands utterly dominated by foreign, mostly U.S., titles - one despairs at the lost promise of a failed Canadian perspective on, say, global affairs. But the reaction to the death of such publications always is that the Canadian market is too small, that Canadian audiences aren't interested in Canadian stories, that distributors discriminate against small titles...all of which is, in varying degrees, true.

But what we don't hear, and should, is that far too many new titles sabotage themselves from the start with a cost structure that is impossible to support beyond the first three issues. Costs which don't advance the publication's mission to inform, but quickly conspire in its premature demise - long before the potential audience of readers, advertisers and angel investors has even had a chance to even see it.

There's more to this story, we're sure.