Converting from paid to controlled

More on the controlled/paid front: The current issue of the newsletter of the Circulation Marketing Association of Canada(CMC) has an article by David R. Livesey of Rogers Media on Profit magazine's choice to change from paid, to controlled.After a constant struggle to maintain a paid base, Rogers's Profit decided to convert to controlled (or, rather "request") in the fall of 2002. Doug

One magazine organization

The division of the Canadian magazine industry into several different associations -- consumer magazines, for trade, for editors, for the magazine awards, for circulators, for newsstand marketers -- has always been easy to understand, but difficult to justify. It is quite possible for disparate groups to gather in one place -- witness the Creating Canada conference in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago

Shameless plug

What's the benefit of doing this sort of thing unless, occasionally, you manage to plug something that matters to you? In this case, it is a new course debuting this spring at Ryerson University. It's called So You Want to Start a Magazine? and it's intended to be very practical, very specific and very accessible. The target audience for this course are people who are actively considering or

Nausea-inducing cover colours

Is this some kind of trend? The March issue of Toronto Life has a day-glo orange cover, which goes not at all with its trademark red logo background. Then this week Report on Business Magazine close-crops Ted Rogers and displays him surrounded by the most off-putting day-glo violet imaginable. What were the art directors, the editors and the publishers thinking?

Picking on an easy target

It seems there isn't an event at which industry gossip is prevalent but when someone says something disparaging about Maclean's magazine. There can be various opinions expressed: either that the magazine is crap; or that nobody reads it; or both.Perhaps every industry needs a whipping boy, and Maclean's is it. But isn't it curious that such disparagement seems to come from people who haven't read

The Daily Folly

The impending launch of Dose, CanWest MediaWorks's new "daily magazine" provoked the following reaction from M2 President and media guru Hugh Dow:“This is insanity. There will be heavy casualties…and some major red ink appearing somewhere.”It is nice to know that I am not alone in thinking the idea of printing 320,000 copies of Dose every day and distributing it through newspapers in Calgary,

She didn't see it coming

According to a report in the Globe & Mail, Suzanne Boyd, the wunderkind editor of Suede (and former Editor at Flare) which was killed this week by Time Inc. after only four issues, was gobsmacked by the news. She never saw it coming, which may be part of the problem.Editors who pay little or no attention to the economics of their magazines are doomed to be similarly surprised. It is not possible

Common mistakes of small magazine publishers

As a consultant to the Canadian magazine industry, I've learned a thing or five... 1. Over-estimating revenue, underestimating costs The single biggest, over-arching mistake that magazine publishers make is being too optimistic about revenue and not pessimistic enough about costs. Whatever can go wrong, will. Whatever you think will happen with revenue, it will never be as good as you think.

We did this to ourselves

A response to a recent column in Masthead magazine (Hooked on controlled), in which a veteran circulation manager says controlled circulation is the devil's work:Like Scott Bullock, I am partial to the traditional paid circulation model, but unlike him I don’t see it as more virtuous or worthy than controlled. Most magazines are in the business of selling readership to advertisers. The central