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 ...