Magawards release a guide to taking advantage of being an award winner

The National Magazine Awards Foundation has launched a new, free best practices guide for content creators. The Foundation, which runs the annual national magazine awards, says it will help NMA-winners and nominees to leverage their awards. A pdf version of the guide is available here. 

"The guide provides detailed promotional strategies, insightful personal testimony and plenty of other useful resources to help award winners and nominees best leverage and optimize their National Magazine Awards."

In addition to the guide, the foundation has released a webinar that grew out of a discussion in November called the Winners' Circle (which I moderated) and in which three NMA winners–Penny Caldwell of Cottage Life, Matthew Blackett of Spacing and Katherine Laidlaw of The Walrus–shared their best practices on how to capitalize on their recognition of winning a National Magazine Award.

Best Practices Guide is still there, awaiting adoption and use

A discussion about the relationships between editors, magazine and freelancers took place on Wednesday morning at the MagNet industry conference. The views expressed led me to believe that some of the people were unaware of the Best Practices Guide, a draft, collaborative industry document that talks about the obligations and expectations of editors, writers and publishers. 

So here are excerpts from the post from May 2012 about the creation of the guide which some of us hoped would be adopted as a sort of industry standard.

A collaboration between the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors and Magazines Canada led recently to the creation of a Best Practices Guide for the Canadian magazine industry. (A draft has been released and can now be downloaded here.) 

(I have a particular interest because it was my suggestion originally that we try to capture the various obligations and responsibilities that editors, publishers and freelance contributors have to each other and to the magazines for which they work.)

Part of the reason this document was thought to be a good idea was that there were widespread misunderstandings about what best practices were and how we should behave with and to each other, not least because of disagreements about contracts, rights, payments and working conditions. 

The draft contains background on how the document was developed, so I won't go into that here, except to say that one of the steps was a comprehensive industry survey entitled Respect and Remuneration: attitudes about editorial working conditions in the Canadian magazine industry . 

Participants in the session at the MagNet industry conference called Yes, We Can All Just Get Along (WR2, Wednesday June 6, [2012] 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.) have already been sent a link to the draft, which may animate the discussion, and copies will be available to conference attendees at the registration desks for review and comment.

Eventually it is hoped that the guide will be adopted by the various industry associations in much the same way that the advertising-editorial guidelines were. 

It's not intended to be a prescription or a rigid rulebook, but a set of agreed professional standards for most people, most of the time, in most circumstances. 

Comments about the draft can be made on this blog or can be sent to edickson[at]magazinescanada[dot]ca

Professional respect can be won, but it's a matter of constant vigilance

I was asked to write a post for NetWords, the blog of the Toronto chapter of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC). It was about the Best Practices Guide which I was involved in drafting on behalf of the magazine industry. It was the result of an industry-wide online survey and a series of roundtables across the country, involving writers, editors and publishers. But since the Guide was written and posted on the PWAC website, there has been -- at least from my perspective --relatively little discussion about it. So, for the post, I agreed to say something. 

"If magazine writers want to be treated with respect, they will have to insist on the reflection of The Guide’s principles in their day-to-day working relationships with editors and publishers (and other writers). Writers have a vested interest in provoking discussion about the professional obligations The Guide details. These guidelines were, after all, derived from the shared experience of writers, editors and publishers. Only by citing those experiences and expectations in negotiations and disputes will writers accustom publishers and editors to regard it as a reasonable, broadly acceptable way of working together."

Best Practices Guide for Canadian magazine industry released for discussion and comment

A collaboration between the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors and Magazines Canada led recently to the creation of a Best Practices Guide for the Canadian magazine industry. (A draft has been released and can now be downloaded here.)

(I have a particular interest because it was my suggestion originally that we try to capture the various obligations and responsibilities that editors, publishers and freelance contributors have to each other and to the magazines for which they work.) 

Part of the reason this document was thought to be a good idea was that there were widespread misunderstandings about what best practices were and how we should behave with and to each other, not least because of disagreements about contracts, rights, payments and working conditions.

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