Friday, September 30, 2005

Better than money?

The Department of Canadian Heritage is planning to give more than money to successful applicants for its various support programs for magazines. Under development is a "benchmarking" exercise whereby each applicant will receive tables and graphs that allows comparison with other magazines, other types of magazines. These will be fairly specific analyses of various components of cost and revenue, compared on a per-page or per copy basis. This data may replace some of the "census" information that Statscan has traditionally (but no more) provided to the industry. However, unlike Statscan, these benchmarks will only be of applicants to various programs such as Support for Editorial Content (SEC) or support for small or literary magazines.

In an industry as starved for good, reliable competitive information, this is very good news.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ah, D.B., nothing is better than money, but it's good to know that what can often feel like "meaningless data collection" in grant applications can sometimes be turned around to "add value" for the publishers. Now if only I could stop using ironic quotes around everything (probably why I ended up on the business side and not editorial). I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about the benchmarking tool.

5:49 pm  

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