BCAMP to be refreshed and rebranded as Magazines BC

The British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers, popularly known to date as BCAMP will very likely be changing its name to Magazines BC after approval from its annual general meeting on Saturday, June 12. In the annual report for 2009, executive director Rhona MacInnes explains:

In the process of strategic planning made possible with a Flying Squad grant, BCAMP has reaffirmed its vision and mission and has embraced a brand refresh, emerging with a new look and a new marketing name. Doing business as Magazines BC, your organization hopes that it will appear more inclusive to industry partners, more memorable to the general public and more appealing to corporate sponsors.

In addition, planning is well underway for the development of a charitable arm, which we hope will allow us to draw from a larger pool of funders, and provide stability and sustainability to those key programs that provide education and advance research for our industry.

All of the arts and culture groups in BC are still reeling from drastic funding cuts from the B.C. government and the intention to develop charitable status, announced in April,would result in creation of WSPER, The Western Society for Periodical Education and Research. This depends, of course on the granting of the privileged charitable status by the Canada Revenue Agency. If granted, the separate arm of Magazines BC would seek new sources of private and public funding to raise capital and operational support for BC magazines.

Related posts: 

• BCAMP seeking charitable status ( April 7, 2010)
• Magazines urged to review new charitable fundraising rules (October 6, 2008)
• Not necessarily charitable (February 17, 2006) 
• Will cultural mags be able to meet the CRA fundraising benchmarks? (July 09, 2008)
• Comment about charity status (October 31, 2005)
• Good news, maybe, we'll see (September 28, 2005)

B.C. culture ministry cuts 100% of BCAMP funds as part of "literary clearcut"

The B.C. Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture, cut $20,000 in funding from the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers (BCAMP) on Tuesday. The cut, which represents 100% of the funding that BCAMP receives from the ministry, is effective January 1. Word came in a phone call from the arts & culture branch's executive director Andrea Henning. The cuts are the latest fallout from a budget that was passed in September and effectively gutted arts funding in the province.

Similar total funding cuts were made to the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (which lost $45,000) and BC BookWorld newspaper (which lost $31,000).

“We know there is a recession, and perhaps cuts can be expected,” says Rhona MacInnes, BCAMP executive director, “but 100 percent is shocking. By the province’s own reckoning, the arts sector offers a healthy return on investment, so there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way this government assesses value. Sadly, these Draconian measures are just the beginning. We’ve all been given notice to expect severe cuts to the BC Arts Council.”

MacInnes said that the funding was extremely important to the association -- which represents 82 member magazines -- and is roughly 20% of the organization's budget. BCAMP operates a very small, two-person office. Conversations will be held with the board to see what can be done to cope with the shortfall. Meanwhile, the beleagured literary organziations have formed the Coalition for the Defence of Writing and Publishing in British Columbia in an effort to fight back against what it describes as a "literary clearcut".

“Thus far they have chopped off three heads,” says Alan Twigg, publisher of BC BookWorld for twenty-one years, “but indications are that more heads will roll.”

The 50-member Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, founded in 1974, is the largest regional affiliate of the Association of Canadian Publishers. It does extensive business, marketing, promotion and awareness programs.

“Our B.C. publishers are reeling,” says ABBPBC executive director Margaret Reynolds. “It is an absolutely bizarre decision. Governments across the country, federal and provincial, recognize the importance of culture to the lives of their citizens. Why invest in this infrastructure then unceremoniously withdraw it?”

BC BookWorld is a quarterly, distributed to more than 900 outlets around the province and reaching approximately 100,000 readers per issue. It has been identified by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing—in a report commissioned by the BC government—as “the most important cog in the infrastructure” that supports writing and publishing in B.C.

“BC BookWorld generates 70% of its own revenues,” says Twigg, “So Arts & Culture has chosen to sabotage something literary that is genuinely popular, public-serving, non-elitist and educational. It boggles the mind. We’re the focal point for all B.C. books and authors.”

Twigg got a brief phone call less than a month before his non-profit society was scheduled to renew its 21-year partnership with the provincial government. According to a press release from the coalition, some sectors of the literary economy have already been hurt.

“Essentially the B.C. government saw they had a deficit,” says Bryan Pike, executive director of the BC Book Prizes, “and we didn’t have any. So they decided to give us some of theirs! They are off-loading debt onto charitable organizations.”

Thaw in BC freeze on gaming revenue grants

There has been a partial thaw in the B.C. freezing of gaming revenue grants. The ministry of housing and social development has lifted a freeze on $159 million dollars, some of which goes in stable funding grants to B.C. magazines and magazine-related organizations.

BCAMP promotes its members in Vancouver bus shelters

The BC Association of Magazine Publishers has taken advantage of an opportunity to promote its publication members in ads in 15 bus shelters around Vancouver.

It is part of a City of Vancouver program for non-profits and gives priority to campaigns tied to specific events. So BCAMP is promoting the Word on The Street festival on September 27. It's headed There's More to Explore in B.C.'s Magazines. The ads will be seen in shelters from August 17 to September 28. The poster can also be downloaded from the association's website.

BCAMP seeks new executive director, new project coordinator

BCAMP, the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, is looking for a new Executive Director and a new Project Coordinator. Word on the sidewalk is that candidates with some experience of lobbying government and arts councils (eg. the B.C. Government and the B.C. Arts Council) will be looked on kindly.

For many years BCAMP has avoided paying the fare from Vancouver to Victoria where a strong Executive Director might press for tax credits, government advertising in B.C. magazines, proper cultural funding, and generally chat up government functionaries and politicos who know nearly nothing about the huge magazine industry in B.C. (as described by Rowly Lorimer in 2005 in a study available in a pdf).

Prospective candidates should send a note to exec@bcamp.bc.ca forthwith.

[UPDATE: According to an item in mastheadonline, Anna Torres resigned from BCAMP as executive director to take a position with Vancouver private company that manages health and science associations.]

Dampness at WOTS, BCAMP, Walrus

Word On the Street in Vancouver was heavily rained on for the first time in its history yesterday, and it was cold and windy and you had to keep jumping up and down to stay warm. The crowd was thin and hardy; indeed, heartiness was evident everywhere. CUPE picketers sang and led revolutionary chants. It was impossible to stand still long enough to grill members of BCAMP in a search for answers to the Nine Questions posted here last week, although I did learn that another BCAMP director has resigned from the board.

And the rumour making its way into through the moisture-laden venue next to the Vancouver Public Library was that The Walrus is having big trouble flogging seats, at $125 per, for “Go North Young Man,” an event described as a reception with post-reception, in Vancouver, on 9 October. There were no troubling rumours concerning a Walrus Calgary event labelled “Guess Who’s In Charge Now?” set for 22 October at the same price, or an Ottawa event, “Globalization or Bust,”scheduled for 3 October at a mere $110 a ticket.

BCAMP demurs

Silence continues to emanate from the tiny headquarters of the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers in the tower of the historic Sun Building in Vancouver, where as reported in an earlier post, the air has been rank with unpleasantness. Nine months or more have passed since the eruption of a “labour dispute” that has yet to be named or discussed before the membership, or even settled by the directors of BCAMP, including those elected in June of 2007.

The labour dispute, also referred to as a “staffing dispute,” appears to be embedded in larger problems of insiderism, coterie-building, and conflict of interest.

On September 2, two ex-directors of BCAMP (I am one of them) outlined the following complaints in an email sent to each of the current BCAMP directors, none of whom has responded:

1. Unresolved staffing dispute not disclosed to board or to the membership at the AGM.
2. President’s refusal to deal with member concerns.
3. Improper denial of member participation on committees.
4. Failure to schedule an external investigation as advised by the Mediator engaged to resolve the “staffing dispute.”
5. Conflicts of interest: research contracts.
6. Questionable documents: A policy and procedures manual never adopted by the membership.
7. Improper procedures: minutes improperly kept; job and salary reviews not made.
8. Inexperienced board of directors kept in the dark.
9. A climate of secrecy and bad faith.

One of the new directors of BCAMP resigned from the board in the summer of 2007, although his name remains on the BCAMP web page.

BCAMP lists 63 member publishers on its web page.

BCAMP up in the air

For the last six months, the BC Association of Magazine Publishers has been stumbling along under veils of secrecy thrown over a putative “labour dispute” that has been boiling away since February, an odd state of affairs for a staff consisting of two people working in one room. No mention of the dispute was made at the BCAMP Annual General Meeting in June, and the only committee that made no report to the AGM was the so-called Human Resources Committee, whose members were not identified.

In the aftermath of the AGM, a few rank-and-filers learned to their dismay that at least some of the Directors on the board knew nothing about the “dispute,” which had become so inflamed that the two employees engaged or embroiled in it were permitted to work in the same room only in the presence of a third party. This policy (unreported to the membership and at least some of the Board) must have posed no difficulty as the BCAMP office is (in my memory) a tiny room in the spire of the historic Sun Tower on Pender Street, where third parties have merely to open the door to separate first and second parties in the act of lunging for each other’s throats.

Attempts by BCAMP members to find out what’s going on with either the “dispute,” which is still unresolved, or with the anonymous Human Resources Committee, have been spurned in emails from the president who, having consulted a “solicitor” and a “litigator,” has concluded that no discussion of the putative dispute can include rank-and-file members, who unlike board members are unprotected against “potential liability” and therefore would be putting themselves at risk. (The same rank-and-filers observe however unfairly that BCAMP has operated for years as a coterie of board members determined to protect the membership from damaging itself with too much information.)

Publishing spectacles are not unknown to the historic Sun Tower, originally the World Tower, when it was the tallest building in the British Empire (103 metres), and owned by the World newspaper. In 1918 Harry Gardiner, aka the Human Fly, scaled its heights equipped only with bare fingers and sneakers, while thousands watched from the street. Five years later, after the Vancouver Sun moved into the tower, another huge crowd gathered in the street to watch Harry Houdini escape from a straitjacket while dangling from a rope above the sidewalk. They just don’t make publishing spectacles like they used to anymore.