What I told the National Magazine Awards audience

My acceptance speech at Friday night's National Magazine Awards, where I received the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement, was well received, I'm told. Here's part of what I said (given a pulpit, I think, you should use it.)

I’d like to talk to you about the magazine ecosystem; like many such, there is a certain amount of turmoil beneath the surface of the magazine industry. On this night when we applaud our best creators – a good many of them are drifting into other fields where they can earn enough to raise a family and live a decent life. Most sensible editors will admit they are finding it hard to cultivate and retain good first-draft writers, people who make their jobs easier and our magazines better. Aspiring magazine writers are finding it harder and harder to be able to concentrate on perfecting their craft. At the same time, we have been progressively replacing good, entry-level staff positions with serial unpaid internships.

I have been an unapologetic champion of fair payment and treatment of staff and writers, illustrators, photographers and others among the self-employed such as copy editors and fact-checkers. Recently, for instance, I helped to create a draft Best Practices Guide for writers, editors and publishers. I hope when it is released this fall it will start useful conversations about our investment in content creation and how we can treat each other better. I would hate to think that we know, as with Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The paradox of our business is that as the industry concentrates at the top end, as magazines need to rely more and more on independent contributors, as more and more people clamour to join the conversation, the tangible recognition of skilled contributors has stagnated and declined. Demands on writers have increased as pay rates have decreased. Writers have to give up control over their intellectual property in order to work for some of our larger magazines. So we have the unedifying spectacle of publishers exploiting the weakness of freelancers just because they can… and of freelancers grudgingly accepting this because they feel powerless.

In their own, long-term best interests, publishers and editors need to re-examine the way in which they treat and compensate the creators of the content upon which their magazines depend. And freelancers need to remember that everything is negotiable, but they have to speak up forcefully on their own behalf. I realize there is no line item in magazine budgets that is labeled “respect”, but respect costs nothing and lubricates magazine relationships.

Thanks to the board of the National Magazine Awards Foundation for selecting me and to Gwen Dunant, Kat Tancock, Charles Oberdorf, Bernadette Kuncevicius, David Hayes, Penny Caldwell and Alastair Cheng for nominating me. 

Full text

Tearing down the crepe; Canadian magazines can fight back with facts

One of CBC Radio's biggest audiences is Metro Morning, the drive-time show hosted by Andy Barrie in Toronto. What people hear there is often the fodder for watercooler chat later in the day. So it was with some dismay that I heard the interview Barrie conducted this morning with Marco Ursi, the editor of Masthead magazine about the state of the industry.

Ursi did a good job of answering questions carefully and thoroughly, but by the time he did so, the introduction had so thoroughly muddled up the state of daily newspapers and large U.S. titles with the situation for Canadian magazines that most listeners would have written us off. (To add insult, the CBC managed to spell Ursi's name wrong on its website.)

For radio people, I guess, it's all print and gloom makes for a better story. Nuance and qualifiers need not apply. No distinction is made between the Canadian and U.S. market. This is not the first time, nor will it likely be the last, that a radio host and his/her producers paint such a skewed and bleak picture.

The best that can be hoped for is that hammering away at the facts will somehow mitigate the damage done. Facts such as

• the 70% long-term (1996 - 2007) advertising page growth among Canadian magazines;
• the 35% ad revenue growth since 2001;
• the long-term trend has been an average of 61 launches per year and only 19 closures;
• that 281 net new titles have been created in the past 5 years;
• that the number of Canadian consumer titles have increaed 45% since 1998;
  
• that average issue circulation has grown since 2002 from 61 million to 73 million;
• that Print Measurement Bureau data about readership has been steadily growing.
  

The best defence against such crepe-hanging views of the industry is to keep on hammering away at the facts and (consistent with a recent post) to redouble efforts to cultivate and serve loyal subscribers and readers. So that the next time they hear about our impending doom, they can know that such rumours are greatly exaggerated.

Survey seeks to determine best practices in Canadian magazine industry

A partnership of three Canadian magazine organizations -- the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors, Magazines Canada and the Professional Writers Association of Canada -- have commissioned some research into the state of the industry.

It's an attempt to get at what some of the best practices are or might be in the industry. To that end, an online questionnaire has been created and e-mail invitations are going out to a variety of lists (unfortunately, it may mean that some of you will get more than one; I hope you will forgive this.)

Anyone in the magazine industry is invited -- encouraged -- to complete the questionnaire. You may do so by clicking the link below.

Click Here to take survey

The survey will be up and available until end of day May 15. Everyone who wishes to do so is provided with the opportunity to enter a draw for a prize pack, including a ticket to the National Magazine Awards on June 6.

Disclosure: My company has been commissioned to conduct the research and analyze the results.