The Globe today reports this tidbit, in the midst of a James Adams article about the relaunch gala coming up for Maclean's: the back page column, a staple of the magazine for years, is moving inside a...
Here's a new wrinkle: a "rewards" system for readers who bring new subscribers. The well-known self-help book Chicken Soup for the Soul in July spawned a new 6-time, 150,000 circ. magazine ...
The Media In Canada headline is certainly provocative: Microsoft gets between the sheets with Chatelaine. The article describes how a "branded section"called the Holiday Helpbook is being co...
A column in the November 7 issue of Business Week explores what is apparently a major or developing trend; the erosion of men's interest in print magazines. Research at Time Inc. indicates that women'...
An earlier post reported that Britain's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) was seriously considering breaking the monopoly of magazine distribution. Now, it appears from an article in the Guardian, vigorous...
These have likely reached some of you via the Internet. But fun for those who may have missed them: Q: How many freelancers does it take to screw in a light bulb?A: No one's sure. The ones who can scr...
Statistics Canada, in a survey published today about spending in all relevant departments federally, provincially and municipally, confirmed what the magazine industry already knows about -- major spe...
The official rebranding of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) to the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) comes next May, but the association is rolling it out already an...
A surprising number of people read the Globe and Mail, and James Adams's piece on Saturday concerning charitable tax status for magazines. If you were not among them, here is the text (please pardon t...
An interesting article in the New York Times about the broadening sales clout of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). It's a lesson in cross-marketing and brand development that ought t...
Lest you think that Maclean's is to be put out by a skeleton crew after more than a dozen senior people were shown the door, Editor-in-Chief Ken Whyte has made a flurry of announcements about people h...
Media in Canada reports that Baxter's Soups has a campaign running in subsequent issues of Chatelaine, complete with perforated stitch-in recipe cards opposite the full-page ads. So far, no big deal. ...
Zoo magazine has run afoul of the British Advertising Standards Authority for its promotional contest to win breast augmentation for some lucky reader's girlfriend. Read more about it here in The Guar...
Blair Oake, the publisher of The CapeBretoner magazine, has announced that the magazine will cease publication effective with a final, December 2005 issue. It's a great loss. The magazine has struggl...
The Oct. 17th issue of People magazine on page 155 had an ad for Canada Post's "Ship-in-a-click" service, an ad we haven't seen in most Canadian magazines. True, People delivers a large Can...
For those of us who have accepted as holy writ that paid, subscriber copies are the gold standard for this business, there are now some fairly heavy duty voices that aim to knock us out of our complac...
McPheters and Company, a consultancy in the U.S. has announced the development of a new readership service called readership.com. It is said to give advertisers and agencies up-to-the minute measureme...
This from Media in Canada: Canadian Family adds two The St. Joseph Media family is growing. The media company has named Carina D'Brass Cassidy as publisher and Lisa Murphy as editor-in-ch...
Stitches, the humour magazine aimed at doctors, owned and published by trade publisher CLB Media, announced some time ago that it would launch a spinoff, Stitches for Patients. That was due to roll ou...
Get back to work!This, quoted from an item in Advertising Age:U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years* reading blogs. About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labo...
A new blog that may bear watching: Dirt. Find it here. The anonymous contributor(s) promise lotsa gossip-mongering, but without the $120 a year tha e-Frank costs. That remains to be seen. Curiously, w...
Of possible use to publishers who are wrestling with the "free vs. paid" connundrum about their own website content, consider the experience of the Globe and Mail. Last year it launched its ...
If you ever wondered why people have less time to read magazines, it's because of a staggering long-term trend in watching television. Seems a commonplace observation, but we were struck by the follow...
Canada Post is offering visitors to its website the opportunity to subscribe to magazines. Not just Canadian magazines mind you. When you go to their site, it links you to individual magazine subscrip...
There, on the CNN website was the news, just minutes after the announcement was made by St. Joseph Media: Saturday night is dead. Wow, this must be a bigger story that we thought!Turns out the item, ...
Maclean's has launched a fully digital edition, which you can apparently try free, from Zinio. It seems to be the only Canadian magazine to have taken the plunge into this online system, which has hit...
St. Joseph Media just killed Saturday Night magazine (October issue at right). Faced with the daunting task of weaning it off its controlled distribution through the dwindling National Post (the contr...
Matt Haber weighs in on the American Society of Magazine Editors' Top 4o magazine covers of all time in the New York Observer and, for good measure, reveals that there was a selection of the 40 worst ...
Did Maclean's, which has recently had a major purge of more than a dozen long-serving employees, see the irony in their October 19 cover story about loyalty in the workplace? Apparently not.
Today, a packed roomful of concerned individuals, mostly involved in circulation, gathered at the Courtyard Marriott in Toronto to hear about the impact from the Department of Canadian Heritage's deci...
George Lois, the man who launched some of the most memorable and (to use an over-used, but apt word, iconic) Esquire covers of the 1960s, ripped into the industry yesterday with a speech deploring the...
"This is what judging magazines comes down to. Put any sampling of the great and the good together, feed them proper coffee and posh biscuits and they will soon favour the magazine with the most ...
Andre Prefontaine of Transcontinental is heading up a Magazines Canada task force about single copy sales in this country, according to a report in today's Mastheadonline. Prefontaine says that the si...
The Canadian Advertising Research Foundation (CARF) is having a breakfast and morning seminar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on October 26 on the topic "Product Placement: Is it Worth All t...
Real Media Riffs from Media Post (you can subscribe, free, here) reports that there were several clauses that did not make the cut when the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) drafted their j...
The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), basking in the warmth of the American Magazine Conference in the Puerto Rico sun, have unveiled a revised set of guidelines about advertising. It is so...
People magazine has been named Magazine of the Year by industry bible Advertising Age. Since no magazines from anywhere other than the United States were considered, it is really the American Magazine...
Many Canadian magazines, particularly in the women's service category, rely heavily on packaged goods advertising. So there are bound to be tremors caused by reports that Kraft Foods Inc. is restructu...
Leafs Nation, the magazine of the Maple Leafs hockey team fan club, was custom published until it was suspended when the season was suspended last year. Now that the teams are on the ice, is St. Josep...
Siemens Corp. announced at a European trade fair this week that it is only two years away from marketing paper-thin TV screens that could be stitched into high end magazines. Probably only affordable ...
Mastheadonline reports that Federal Finance Minister John McCallum is "still considering" an appeal by The Walrus of its turn-down for charitable status. Publisher Ken Alexander is keeping m...
The era of the branded feature (as what used to be called advertorial has come to be called) is blossoming, judging by an article in Media in Canada about a deal featured in the current issue of 2 mag...
Somewhat off topic, but delicious nonetheless, a profile by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times Book Review of October 9 about Joan Didion (sparked by her new book The Year of Magical Thinking) refer...
The unhappy denouement of the startup magazine Zi is reported in today's Mastheadonline. It seems the front end costs were so high that the publisher has decided before the first issue comes out that ...
There are a number of magazine categories in which, despite many false starts, there is a perennial belief that the problem is simply not finding the right formula. Canada is a hard place to start cer...
It can't be entirely a coincidence that, a few days after Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Ken Whyte assured the Maclean's staff that there would be no more terminations, Deputy Art Director Gary Hall was sh...
The case of Robertson versus Thomson, the 10-year marathon legal fight fronted by Heather Robertson against the Globe and Mail concerning digital rights to freelance work, comes before the Supreme Cou...
Jon Stewart's recent demolition of a panel of magazine industry stuffed shirts in New York was probably deserved. It was reported by Simon Houpt on Monday in the Globe and Mail (regrettably, subscript...
If you are overcome with the desire to start a magazine, start here or click on the link at the right. This is a reminder about a new course called So You Want to Start a Magazine? It's two days at Ry...
Another new quarterly lifestyle mag rides out of the west (Calgary) called Zi, due to be launched later this month. It's the creation of a woman from Calgary called Zinat H. Damji. The publisher says ...
At the egghead end of the magazine and advertising business, it is the done thing to talk in every conversation about "accountability", ROI (return on investment) and ROO (return on objecti...
Things you can learn from reading of the classified ads: Somebody is planning a new, apparently controlled circ, guidebook for theatre-going in Toronto called Evening Out. It says it is going to be ...
Maclean's magazine's 100th anniversary gala, postponed until November 15, is also changing venue. It was to be at the Windsor Arms Hotel. Now it is to be at the Toronto Centre for the Arts in its Main...
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" exercis...
St. Joseph Corporation wasn't fooling when it said it was intent on becoming a major player. To do so, it needs the best management and it looks like it is well on its way to achieving this.Two pivota...
A story out of the U.S. today from the Center for Media Reseach shows so-called "blue state" voters were more likely to have high speed internet access got us to thinking. First, the highlig...
The implications of today's article in the Globe and Mail about charitable status are far-reaching. The story itself is about the possibility that Revenue Minister John McCallum may loosen or change t...
Interesting that the newish blog from the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (see it here) intends to publish a monthly celebration of member achievements. September's is heavy on kudos for publ...
If anyone was wondering what Ted Byfield, founder of the late Alberta Report, has been doing lately, the news is what he's not doing anymore. According to an item in the Western Standard's so-called S...
That sound you heard was a shotgun going off. Gardening Life moves under the sole ownership of St. Joseph Media, effective September 30. It ends an 8-year partnership between St. Joseph (and, before ...
The industry rumbles into action about PAP as Magazines Canada and the Circulation Management Association (CMC) hold a joint session on October 19 at 9 a.m. at the Toronto Marriott; there, Michael Fox...
One of the largest auditing firms, BPA Worldwide, has announced its intention to move to release of at least the "top line" circulation of magazines for each issue, rather than in six-monthl...
Ricepaper magazine is celebrating 10 years of publishing, an evolution from a hand-stapled newsletter into a slick and authoritative magazine of Asian Canadian culture. Many magazines with similar roo...
We said earlier that The Beaver (never noted for its covers) was going to have a whole new look effective with its 85th anniversary issue, out October 3. Here's a sneak peek of what new Art Director M...
In Britain, newspapers and magazines are distributed together to retailers and newsagents, mostly by three large wholesalers. Some 90% of British magazines are sold by single copies or by "standi...
The magazine industry is quick to complain that newspapers either slothfully or wilfully misreport the issues that affect us. So credit should be given where it is due: today's column by Kate Taylor i...
The redoubtable and excellent Paul Wells, who has a lease on the back page of Maclean's, has taken to defending the changes at his employer and points out in other conversations that more people were ...
I honestly don't know what to say.See Masthead Online today, lead story (the longest I recall them ever publishing online). Let's just throw it open for discussion. What's everyone think about this?
Many trade publishers, at least in the U.S., have e-mail addresses for fewer than half of their readers, according to an article in Media Business. Many have valid e-mail addresses for only 20 or 30 p...
Perhaps it was summer, perhaps we were not paying attention, perhaps it was Ontario-centricity, but somehow we missed reporting that one of Canada's oldest magazines, The Beaver, has a new Editor.Murd...
Back in June, the blog carried an item about fact-checking. Recently, it made the rounds of a newsgroup of freelancers in Toronto and at least one of them posted a comment (three months late, as he sa...
In June 2002, Maclean's underwent a complete and substantial redesign, under the auspices of then-AD Donna Braggins. Now, it is being redesigned again by the new AD Christine Dewairy. And since the n...
How much readers pay for a subscription is a less important indicator of value to an advertiser than how engaged they are with the content (edit and advertising). This said during a high-powered panel...
A relatively new blog has been started by the Periodical Writers Association of Canada. It can be reached here. Of interest was the take of some of the freelancers about the sturm und drang in the ind...
Lewis Lazare, a columnist at The Chicago Sun-Times described the New Yorker decision last month to publish an entire issue sponsored by one national retail chain, Target, as “the most jaw-dropping col...
The chattering classes have always dismissed Maclean's as yesterday's magazine, quite unreasonably. It has a large and largely loyal readership. But what the chatterers haven't thought of is Maclean's...
In the recent kerphuffle over Publications Assistance Program's funding levels, Heritage's director general of publishing policy and programs Gordon Platt has suggested on Masthead Online that the in...
With all the kerfuffle about income trusts, very little of it has seemed to touch magazine publishing so far. But quietly, over the summer, a few quite good magazines were absorbed into the Osprey Med...
The continuing Maclean's watch: 17-year veteran Senior Editor Barbara Wickens got her walking papers on Monday. We're losing count of the experienced, senior people who've been shown the door.
Today (Monday, September 12) is the deadline for responses to Canada Post's invitation to Canadian publishers to collaborate in launching a "consumer" magazine tentatively called Smartmoves....
Another casualty at Maclean's. Writer Sharon Doyle Driedger, on leave for the past year to work on a book about the Irish in Canada, was due back at work today. That is, until Publisher Ken Whyte pers...
It has been reported that Mediamark Research International (MRI) will conduct a series of studies on readership comparing digital magazines with print magazines. It is being done in conjunction with Z...
Today's Mastheadonline records rumblings among freelancers about slow/late payments from The Walrus. To his credit, Ken Alexander, the Publisher, give a guarantee that everyone will get paid, eventual...
And, speaking of Maclean's, a cryptic e-mail has been winging about, pushing back the black-tie, by-invitation-only celebration at the Windsor Arms of the magazine's 100th anniversary. It was to be Se...
Early in August we reported a rumour about Maclean's magazine deep-discounting its subs. Then, it was only a rumour. Today, as a freestanding insert in the Globe and Mail, it is a fact:The handsome, 1...
Magazines Canada is reeling from a massive slap in the face from the Department of Canadian Heritage. DCH has quietly announced, without consultation and with less than 60 days notice, a huge cut in t...
Tracy Miller has been promoted to Director of Sales at the Urban Group of St. Joseph Media. She replaces Associate Publisher Kim Peacock who is leaving to become Publisher, Western Magazines for Trans...
Another in our sporadic series about Canadian magazines we love. This time, Prairies North.When a magazine is published so far off the beaten track as is Prairies North, it had better be good. And it ...
Apparently Don Obe, retired head of the magazine program at Ryerson, is writing a piece for Masthead's back page on the crumbling wall between editorial and advertising, exemplified by the Maclean's d...
More word on the wholesale changes being made to staff at Maclean's. Senior Editor Rob Sheppard is the latest to be let go. Recruited from the Globe and Mail, Sheppard has been at Canada's national ne...
Search as we might, we cannot find a Canadian magazine that has its own cocktail. Which seems a shame. It came to us upon learning that Tin House, a hip new literary publication in the U.S. had a cust...
Kim Pittaway jumped from the editorship of Chatelaine, apparently, because she felt she was being pushed by Publisher Kerry Mitchell. This from today's Michael Posner article in the Globe and Mail. No...
Minister of Canadian Heritage Liza Frulla today announced her department will put off a $4 million reduction in the Publications Assistance Program until 2006 in order "to enable Canadian publish...
Here, from Antonia Zerbisias's excellent blog at the Toronto Star, is a story we wish we'd reported first: August 30, 2005 Not Miss Chatelaine That weeping and wailing you're hearing in ...
Word (from mastheadonline.com) that the Communications Workers plan to organize on behalf of freelancers. Good luck to them. Not that there have been many examples of successfully corralling such a ra...
An interesting question is raised in a recent USA Today report on the declining circ of newsweeklies such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report (no mention of Maclean's, of course). In it, ...
A hopeful student asked the other day what I thought were the prospects for someone coming into the magazine business. She wasn't asking if she'd get rich, only if she had a reasonable shot at making ...
Interesting that the Guardian Weekly, whose Canadian edition is printed in Montreal and fulfilled under contract by Time Canada, should be informing its Ontario customers that -- where possible -- it ...
In all the newspaper blather and commentary about the North American Free Trade Agreement and how awful those mean Americans are to us and how we ought to stand up for ourselves and punch that bully ...
As another in our irregular series about little magazines we love, we present The New Quarterly.Started more than 20 years ago with $3,000 ($1,000 donated by each of Edna Staebler, Farley Mowat and Ha...
This just in: the new art director of Maclean's is Christine Dewairy, being brought over from the National Post where she was art director and fashion editor for Post Fashion. She steps into the job l...
A friend recently pointed out an interesting sentence in the press release by St. Joe's Chairman Tony Gagliano, announcing Donna Clark's hire. Boldface added:St. Joseph Media recently moved into state...
St. Joseph Media has hired Donna Clark to be its President. She starts September 12. Clark, it will be easily remembered,was with Rogers Media where she was responsible for the women's services divisi...
An article in AdAge reports that Black Book, a quirky, but seriously contending U.S. lifestyle mag, recently crossed -- nay leapt -- across the church/state line with an editorial item about a band th...
Noticed in a recent browse, looking for something else, that Canadian Heritage swallows the World Magazine Trends data from the Federation of the Interational Periodical Press hook, line and sinker. I...
An article in Folio: reports that the American Society of Business Publishing Editors (ASBPE) is drafting a new guideline on product placement in editorial. We shouldn't hold out much hope for a ringi...
Media Post has published the results of an international study about broadband use by country. This is a subject that many magazines are -- or should -- be interested in, since broadband users tend to...
I guess it's just doing what everyone else does, but doesn't it seem a bit cheesy for Magazines Canada to try and kite the vote on a spurious Globe and Mail online poll? The poll question asks if the ...
Mastheadonline today published news of the lawsuit by Saltscapes magazine against the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission, (habitues of this blog had this July 27). New to us, however, was that the suit ha...
A reliance on syndicated material from the U.S. and Britain is commonplace in newspapers, but occasionally it leads them to publish breathless features that a) are old news and b) give no local angle ...
Has anyone out there received a direct mail offer for Maclean's that effectively means it is being sold to some subscribers for 57 cents a copy? If so, it is the lowest rate ever having been charged f...
Paul Jones is a class act, and his thank you note in the current issue of Masthead is proof. He took out an ad to thank his friends and supporters in the industry for the honour of receiving the Outst...
The Western Standard, a handsome, idiosyncratic and feisty publication tried to make news this week by publishing its own poll that says that 36% of westerners consider separatism an option. Of course...
The just-released guidelines for the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Magazine Fund (previously Volume Two, son of Volume One) contain an error. The deadline at the top of the information form ...
High end advertisers are starting to push for product placement on magazine spreads and covers south of the border. According to an article in AdAge, Lexus is openly asking for exposure for its pricey...
Another weekly magazine? This week the Toronto Star announced that it was going to launch the Weekly Scoop, a star-struck newsstand celebrity title (gawd knows, we don't have enough of those) startin...
Media in Canada, a website run by Strategy magazine, published the following item in recent days: 2 Magazine takes ad integration to new level by Paula Costello Due to popular demand, To...
Up against a government monopoly, Saltscapes magazine, published out of Dartmouth, is suing the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission for stealing its idea for a new food, drink and lifestyle magazine. Jim an...
According to the Associated Press, TV Guide in the U.S. is effectively getting out of the listings business, cutting its guaranteed circulation by two-thirds and relaunching in a larger format with an...
Announced today that Sharon McAuley will join St. Joseph Media as V.P. Group Publisher of Toronto Life and Saturday Night, at the end of August. Few in the Canadian magazine industry can have had such...
The recent flurry of releases from Magazines Canada (formerly the CMPA) concerning postal rates and the Publications Assistance Program (PAP) is taking a new, tougher attitude and a more public stance...
In most of the discussion about the relationship between magazines and various kinds of new media and technology, texting hasn't figured very much. Magazines seem much more concerned about "monet...
DB Scott is on vacation and I told him I'd try to think of something exciting to say in his absence, but I've only now found something exciting to say:For any small-maggers who aren't already familiar...
Editors on the a recent panel in New York about product placement in magazines bristled at the very notion. "I don't believe if you blur the line between editorial and advertising it makes eith...
An old friend (chronologically and actually) took a strip off recently about fact checking. From the perspective of this experienced writer, poet, essayist, and frequent travel writer, the function of...
OK, folks, whaddaya think? Pretend, just for a moment, that you're a consumer .How many of us would really want to read full-scale magazines entirely online? Am I just a neo-luddite -- are digital m...
The Ken Whyte stamp is being well and truly put on Maclean's with the severance of virtually his entire senior editorial management: longtime Executive Editors Michael Benedict and Bob Levin and Art D...
Cartographica is one among the many specialist journals published by the University of Toronto Press. And included in a notification about a new editorial team taking over (with thanks to the previous...
A small storm seems to have blown up towards the academic edge of the Canadian magazine publishing industry as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is said to be on the verge of...
How's the Canadian magazine business doing? On the surface, it looks good, with revenue and profits up in the most recent Statistics Canada data (2003-04). But we've been drilling down a bit to make s...
The choice of maisonneuve as winner of the President's Medal at the National Magazine Awards on Friday night was very well received, although there was an awkward pause as the Publisher/Editor Derek W...
Over the past five years, according to the new 2003-04 Statscan data, there have been about 357 net new magazines of all kinds. 72% are under 50,000 circulation per issue 28% are less than 20,000 ...
Here are some early highlights from an analysis of the just-published 2003-2004 data from Statistics Canada about the Canadian Periodical industry. (Comparisons are with the 1998-99 data and are for c...
Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, has been through some rough times recently, batted from pillar to post by Primedia, who then sold it to Red 7 Media LLC. Now, suddenly, this expensive trad...
So has anyone else out there noticed what's going on with http://www.amazon.com in the USA? It doesn't seem to be happening in Canada, but it IS happening to Canadian magazines:In the menu on the lef...
The usual frenzy is about as Magazines Week is upon us. Mags U at the Old Mill in Toronto is the place where magazine people work on their upper thighs traipsing upstairs and down in search of the roo...
An interesting items in the Guardian Media site is this from Stephen Armstrong, about a relatively new British magazine (started August 2004) that gets at politics through a very stylish back door. An...
David Zimmer's back page comments about the National Magazine Awards in Masthead's June issue is as mean-spirited a piece as has come along in some time. It think it is meant to be witty. But it is il...
"People don't watch TV. They don't listen to radio. And they don't read magazines. What do they do? They make personal choices. I don't think you sit there and think, 'I have an hour to kill, I t...
Now I'm not one to pine for the good old days; a lot of today's magazines are leagues ahead of yesterday's titles. But I except LIFE magazine, which always set a standard for excellence that is really...
The recently published Top 50 list by revenue for 2004, compiled by Masthead magazine from various sources, indicates that the industry is doing well, with 4% overall growth. There are some standout p...
There is a trendy development in wedding invitations -- the pre-invitation postcard, asking the recipient to reserve the date with a formal invitation to follow. Pre-invitation invitations may be thou...
Looking forward to the forthcoming discussion the Masthead about why prize money has shrunk in the National Magazine Awards. Well, duh. It's because the NMAF has a devil of a time getting industry hea...
It started out with a funereal cover showing a drawer in a morgue (see above), but things must be looking up for the Vancouver Review after surviving a year in a tough market (regional, cult...
Occasionally, we like to promote magazines and independent magazine publishers that, while well known locally, or regionally, don't travel well (or at least their reputation doesn't).DvL Publishing of...
Five shopping magazines, five shelter magazines, four fashion magazines, 16 magazines targeting women, 12 aimed at males, eight targeting the affluent market; these were among the 75 new magazines lau...
The Teamsters's strike at ProLogix is beginning to bite. Overheard near a small grocery store newsstand in Cambridge: "The magazines haven't come in, we won't see them 'til Friday, if then. They'...
Click on the headline to go direct to the National Magazine Awards Foundation website and see the 2005 nominees. The winners will be announced June 10 in Toronto.Nice to see that the Foundation Award ...