Garden Making mag wins honours

Fall issue

Just getting caught up with some honours won by Garden Making magazine of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The quarterly's November issue from last year, featuring Garden Essentials, won a gold medal from the Association for Garden Communicators, the second time the magazine has won.

And editor Beckie Fox was awarded the Garden Media Award by the Perennial Plant Association. It recognizes an individual from the media whose educational and promotional efforts result in heightened public awareness of the importance of the perennial plant industry.

It should be noted that Garden Making can no longer be regarded as a "startup" as it is heading into its 8th year of publishing! Its forthcoming winter issue is all about small space gardening. 

Creator of Jasper comic which ran for years in Maclean's, inducted into hall of cartoonist fame

Cartoonist Seth gave a tribute at the recent Doug Wright Awards to James Simpkins, who was posthumously inducted into the Wright Awards’ Giants of the North hall of fame. 

Simpkins, who died at the age of 93 in 2004, is best known for his comic Jasper, featuring a playful, innocent trouble-making bear, which ran in as a regular panel in Maclean’s and on newspaper comic pages for more than two decades combined. The comic was often a gentle hymn to parks, nature and conservation, but most generally based its humour on the interaction of Jasper with humans. 

[I have a lapel pin of Jasper that is almost inevitably mistaken by people for Yogi Bear, a creation of Hanna-Barbera. I think I'll wear Jasper to the National Magazine Awards.]

Kim Pittaway to receive 2016 Outstanding Achievement Award at the national mag awards

Pleased to see that Kim Pittaway is to receive the 2016 Outstanding Achievement Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation. She earned it, as a journalist, editor, teacher and mentor. One of her nominators, Joyce Byrne, the publisher of Avenue Calgary and the current president of the NMAF said

As a mentor, Kim has inspired my own path in magazine publishing with simple advice: Get involved, volunteer, mentor a young person, have an opinion, lead an organization.

Pittaway, who was managing editor, then editor, of Chatelaine as well as a prolific freelance magazine writer, now lives in Nova Scotia and is a faculty member of the journalism and MFA programs at King's College in Halifax.

This award, recognizing career excellence and service to the Canadian magazine industry, is the highest honour that the NMAs make and Kim joins a select company of recipients (blush, including me). It will be presented at the awards gala on June 10 in Toronto.

Sarah Fulford of Toronto Life to receive honorary degree at Humber College

Sarah Fulford, the editor-in-chief of Toronto Life magazine is being given an honorary degree by Humber College at this week's Spring 2014 convocation. Fulford sits on the Humber Journalism Advisory Board and has been editor of TL since 2008, the first woman ever to run the magazine. She sits on the board of the Toronto Public Library Foundation and, in 2012, co-founded "The New Collection", TPL's young  professional program. 

In its citation for the degree,  the college says

"In 2010, Fulford successfully overhauled Toronto Life with a redesign that a reporter for The Globe and Mail called “smart,” “nuanced,” and “a clear improvement.” "