Small cultural mags were cut adrift because they're not businesses

It was an interesting presentation this week at the MagNet conference in Toronto by Scott Shortliffe, the director of periodical publishing and programs from the Department of Canadian Heritage. He probably gladdened the hearts of publishers large and small by saying that they were only a couple of weeks away from receiving cheques under the new Canada Periodical Fund (CPF). Almost 1,000 titles have qualified under the Aid to Publishers component, which represents the merger of the former Canadian Magazine Fund (CMF) and the Publications Assistance Program (PAP -- commonly known as the postal subsidy).

I should say upfront that Shortliffe should be commended for his frankness and openness in showing up when asked and answering questions from publishers. He has demonstrated himself to be a sympathetic voice in Ottawa and a sensitive student of the magazine business and its economics.

Something he said last week seemed new, at least to me. That was that the Canada Periodical Fund and the periodical program in general is basically an “industry support program” and that his department made the decision (he used the term “rationalization”) that the programming was intended effectively to support magazines as viable businesses. He said that Heritage had made a departure from normal practice and may have made a mistake (under the  CMF) in funding small arts and cultural publications in the first place since success for them is more often judged on artistic merit rather than their business models.

The costs of servicing very small arts and cultural publications (roughly 50 of them are now ineligible under the CPF if they sell fewer than 5,000 copies a year), he said,  outstripped the benefit to Canadians of their tiny circulations (I am paraphrasing). I even thought I heard him refer to these as”micro magazines”.

He pointed out that the Canada Council was in the business, unlike Heritage, of deciding on funding based on artistic merit and was the appropriate place for small arts and culture magazines to go. Of course the shunting of these small magazines and their tiny but important business and circulation issues to the Canada Council is not likely to help those magazines, since no more money seems forthcoming for the Canada Council to offset this increased need.

Small arts and cultural titles which are seeing their postal costs go up 3 or 4 times with the end of the publications assistance program had come to count on the very valuable Support for Arts and Literary Magazines (SALM) funding which met a very real need and had made some very real differences in the audience-building capacities of those magazines. Surely if costs of administering this relatively small portion of the Heritage periodical budget was the problem, streamlining and simplifying the program would have been a better response than cutting its smallest clients adrift. (I have heard from more than one source that the principle reason for the floor on funding was to cut out academic journals, who tap other sources of funding such as SSHRC, and that the small literary and cultural magazines were collateral damage.)

Shortliffe also said that, at least for the next two years, relatively small arts and literary magazines (between 500 and 45,000 circulation) would be eligible for support under the business innovation portion of the CPF. Some of this funding might go to publications that are just under the 5,000-circulation-per-year minimum for the larger fund and could apply for a project to boost their circulation over the threshold. However they will be assessed on the basis of just that -- their innovative ideas -- and they will be competing with much larger publications for this portion of the pot. Many of the challenges facing small cultural magazines, however, are relatively prosaic ones of fundamental audience development or business planning.

Paradoxically, he said he had no problem with his staff making judgements about the innovativeness of particular applications under the business innovation program. This in answer to my question about whether they would be calling in advisors from the magazine industry to determine what was truly worthwhile and innovative – just as the Canada Council does with its peer review panels who determine if a magazine's artistic merits should be supported.

Shortliffe was unable to say if this transitional arrangement (access to the business innovation component for small arts and cultural titles is only approved for two years) might disappear after the 2011-12 year.