BC magazine community dealing with quadruple funding whammy

The decision by the British Columbia government to freeze lottery funds is only the latest blow to magazine publishers in the province.

• Magazines will cost 7% more next July when a harmonized sales tax comes in.
• The funding to the BC Arts Council was cut by 40%, inevitably affecting funding for literary and cultural magazines.
  
• The former federal support for arts and literary magazines (SALM) is being discontinued and a threhold of 5,000 annual paid circulation imposed on the revamped Canada Periodical Fund.
• now the province has frozen $36 million in grants from lottery and gaming revenues that some magazines and magazine-related organizations were expecting.
  

Magazines that directly got a total of $123,000 in lottery funds in 2007-08 (the last report) were Geist, sub Terrain, Western Front, Wordscapes and Vancouver Review; in addition, the Vancouver Book and Magazine Society (which runs the Vancouver Word on the Streeet), Alliance for Arts, Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival and the Federation of BC Writers received funding; what work they do for magazines will undoubtedly be affected as a result.