PWAC offers 18 months of membership for the price of a year

The Professional Writers Association of Canada has launched a membership drive that offers new and returning freelancers 18 months of membership for the price of 12, provided signup by March 31. Plus, memberships($20 a month or $240 a year; $40 for students) give a discounted rate on the MagNet industry conference, a voucher for one free workshop and the chance to win a full MagNet package of four workshops, social events and meals.

Part of the reason for the drive is that PWAC is about t0 launch a rebooted Writers.ca 2.0, a searchable electronic marketplace connecting writers with editors and publishers and allowing online sale of new or existing work. People who sign up now get the opportunity to lock in free access.

Ontario trumpets its creative industry strengths, including magazines

[This post has been updated]The Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) has created a video to promote the diversity and prodigious output of Ontario's creative sector -- including magazines -- called "We've got it going ON". Among the facts included in the accompanying documentation is that Ontario is Canada's largest publishing centre, with almost half (48%) of all Canadian magazines published in Ontario , and the magazine industry in Ontario created an average of 9,389 direct and indirect jobs annually between 1997 and 2005.

[Update] The OMDC awareness campaign will be showcased in print ads in consumer, business and trade publications, and wide range of placements online. The 30-second ad will be seen during the Oscars on Feb. 27th and during the JUNOS on March 27th. The entire program is intended to reach Ontario consumers who use/consume creative media products and key influencers who can affect policy decisions; and  Businesses which might use the services of, partner with, or invest in, Ontario’s creative media companies.

OMDC thanked the Ontario indie band Metric for making their hit song Gimme Sympathy availablefor the video, the members of ACTRA, and the more than 100 Ontario companies that provided their content for use in the campaign.]

Cartwright sale of legal and trade publications is a major shakeup in the magazine industry

Retired Judge Ian Cartwright in Calgary

The decision by former judge Ian Cartwright to sell most of his family holdings in the privately held The Cartwright Group, including Canada Law Book will close a chapter. Cartwright, who believed that Canadian legal data should be controlled in Canada, bought Canada Law Book more than 25 years ago to keep it out of the hands of a foreign-controlled buyer. (Ironically, that is precisely what is happening now in the deal with Thomson Reuters, largely owned outside of Canada.) 

As the principal shareholder in The Cartwright Group, Cartwright is known to have used profits from his publishing operations to be a generous (though largely anonymous) benefactor to such charities at the Sick Children's Hospital Foundation and the Association in the Defence of the Wrongly Convicted*. Now 75, he is apparently planning his estate and wanted to cash out in order to make a "significant and meaningful donation to the charities of his choice".

The decision to sell the remaining b2b titles to Annex Publishing and Printing significantly changes the magazine landscape, essentially removing a major competitor and consolidating those titles in a much bigger company, based outside of the GTA. Annex is based in Simcoe and started out as a publisher of community newspapers but has been steadily launching and acquiring small-scale niche titles for many years. As Niel Hiscox, CLB Media vice-president told Law Times, the CLB titles are complementary as they are not competitive with Annex titles.
*In 2009, Cartwright wrote a personal cheque for $1 million to AIDWYC, even though the group did not have charitable status.

Photo: Chris Bolin, for the Globe and Mail. 
Recent related posts:

• Carswell acquires Canadian Lawyer and Law Times as part of Canada Law Book deal
•  Thomson Reuters buys Canada Law Book

Columnist sees the U.S. magazine industry smaller, dominated by Big 4 and women-focussed

Audience Development columnist Baird Davis (a senior consultant with Circulation Specialists) has compiled data showing how U.S. consumer magazine benchmarks -- circulation, newsstand sales and advertising sales -- aligned in 2009, and the picture was not pretty. (Of course the results don't necessarily reflect Canadian experience.) He calculated that...

• Circulation of audited consumer magazines declined 22% from 2000 to 2009
• Newsstand revenue is off about 16%
• Advertising sales declined by just over 20% in the past two years

"The simultaneous convergence of the three major bellwether indicators, along with signs of a modest advertising recovery in 2010, flattening newsstand sales and the success of a major new publication (Food Network), provide persuasive evidence that the consumer magazine industry is no longer searching for the bottom. The industry appears to have weighed anchor on a smaller business—whose parameters are 20-25 percent smaller—but one that’s ironically, perhaps, more vibrant than the bloated environment they have vacated.

"As a result of its bruising descent the industry is battle scarred and less arrogant. But it’s also leaner, wiser, a more effective consumer and audience development marketer, less advertising-centric and better prepared to cope with the demands of new media and the startling advances in technology."

One of the things he points out is that the business climate is increasingly unfriendly for smaller publishers who are being squeezed by such things as postal rate increases, fulfillment costs, newsstand distribution and the cost of print and paper. 

His prediction?

"The consumer magazine business of the future will be; smaller, more “Big 4” dominant, increasingly women focused, less kind to smaller publishers, multimedia sensitive and more consumer oriented."

News magazines an endangered species in North America

In the last five years (2003-2008) 39% of newsmagazines in North America have disappeared, dropping from 75 publications to 45, according to a story in Folio: about data published in the National Directory of Magazines. As but one example, this year, U.S. News & World Report became a biweekly.)

The Directory (misnamed, since it catalogues some 20,500 U.S. and Canadian titles)says that shelter titles jumped from 82 to 241 titles, making it among the most robust categories, while the largest was for regional titles; 1,120 regional magazines were in existence in 2008.

“Regional magazines capitalize on the fascination with ‘things local’ and also benefit from strong local advertising,” according to Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, publisher of the directory. “Many regional magazines are also pitched to an upscale audience making them doubly attractive to readers and advertisers.”

Marco Ursi is new editor of Masthead magazine

Masthead magazine, Canada's only trade magazine about magazines, has selected Marco Ursi to be its new editor. He replaces Bill Shields, who resigned a few months ago.

Ursi takes up his post today, having last week completed a summer intership at Maclean's magazine. Ursi is a graduate of Ryerson, and was editor of the spring, 2006 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. He is also a blogger (extended drum solo) and his profile says "The key moment in my life came when I realized that a hockey stick can be used to play air bass."

He wrote a number of articles and interviews for Maclean's (listed on his blog) and wrote a profile of Star media critic Antonia Zerbisias for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. He also wrote for the Victoria Times Colonist and has been on the staff of the website PopJournalism.ca

WSJ, USA Today planning...magazines

Two important U.S. daily newspapers have come up with a sure-fire marketing strategy -- both the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are preparing to launch (wait for it) magazines.

According to a story in Ad Age, USA Today is farther along, with glossy launch planned for October. The Wall Street Journal is more in the concept stage, looking at a magazine to augment its Saturday "Weekend Edition", which was launched in 2005.

If they succeed, the projects will point to one of magazines' advantages in the digital age: That a coterie of beauty, fashion and other lifestyle advertisers are happier to spend money if their ads appear on thick, glossy pages.

Of course a Rupert Murdoch deal for Dow Jones (owners of WSJ) might change things, but Murdoch has already told The New York Times he'd consider turning the Journal's Pursuits section into a glossy weekend competitor to the Times Magazine, said the Ad Age story.

Susan C. Lavington, USA Today's senior VP-marketing said "We felt like, given our brand, the fact that we have this broad appeal and are known for covering a lot of different things, it seemed like a good idea to try to launch a magazine that would target this approach."

Each magazine will try to find overlooked editorial space to occupy, but the reality is that living -- however luxurious or active -- is pretty well-represented already in magazines. The real play here is creating a lush reader experience that can't be matched with newsprint, not to mention media outside print.

Media consultant Peter Kreisky said "One of the fundamental rules of publishing is to envisage where people are when they read your publication, because that really determines what the design and look and feel should be."

That's beginning to look like one of the few fundamentals that hasn't changed with the rise of digital media.For certain marketers, particularly on the high end, quality paper and presentation is everything, so adding glossy magazines makes every bit of sense, said Andrew Swinand, president-chief client officer at Starcom USA. "It's sort of like the salads at McDonald's," he said. "It's removing the veto vote. From a distribution standpoint it can't cost much more. If you can further monetize your existing base, have at it.""

Less may be more for magazines

Just catching up with a story from a couple of weeks ago in the Christian Science Monitor about the (U.S.) magazine industry. In it, the writer Randy Dotinga points out that Time magazine is actively shucking subscribers in order to get a higher quality, more profitable and attractive audience. The neighbourhood newspaper may disappear soon, he says, but magazines may have more resilience.

In regard to the future of magazines as a whole, industry insiders will be closely following the success or failure of a glossy new monthly business magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which published its first issue in April.

"Portfolio is being held up as the last big example of whether an old-school print magazine launch can still make it," says Matthew Kinsman, managing editor of the industry journal Folio:. "Their fate will have a lot of impact on the rest of the magazine world."

Overall, there seems to be much less hand-wringing in the magazine industry compared with, say, the newspaper business. There's plenty of speculation that your local daily newspaper could vanish in 20 years or less, but no one is saying that People, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic will go the way of Life and Look magazines.

People move from place to place and encounter different newspapers, but magazines remain longstanding parts of people's lives, says journalism professor David Sumner, coordinator of the magazine program at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. "People feel more of an emotional bond to magazines, particularly if they've been long-term subscribers," he says.

Then there's the simple pleasure of reading a long, fascinating story on the couch instead of in a desk chair, staring at a computer monitor. "The portability and convenience factor will ensure that print magazines will be around for a long time," Sumner predicts.

Quote, unquote

Magazines connect intellectually and emotionally with an educated and thinking reading public. Those are the people who can change a direction for an institution or a company or a neighbourhood or a region.

-- Neville Gilfoy, forthcoming recipient of the outstanding achievement award of the National Magazine Awards, quoted in a profile in the Chronicle-Herald (Halifax).