Selling product placement

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 either one better. It just makes them blurry," said Martha Nelson, Managing Editor of People. But MindShare Senior Partner-Group Media Director Debbie Solomon, moderator of the panel, cited consumer research

Not everybody believes in fact-checking

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 a fact-checker at a magazine is redundant or counter-productive. He also thinks it's insulting. He is not alone.It's not always clear why some people see fact checkers as problems rather than

Zinio: Digital editions ... boring? thrilling?

OK, folks, whaddaya think? Pretend, just for a moment, that you're a consumer [grin].How many of us would really want to read full-scale magazines entirely online? Am I just a neo-luddite -- are digital magazines the wave of the future? Check this out:http://img.zinio.com/corporate/preview_now.htmlI can certainly understand subscribing to brief newsletters on subjects of interest to people's

Remaking Maclean's in his own image

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 Director Donna Braggins. The terminations were effective close of business on Tuesday.Levin, characterized by former Editor Anthony (Tony Two Names) Wilson-Smith as someone who is "exacting,

Now THAT'S missing a deadline!

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 editor) is the following notice:Although there have been a number of efforts to bring the journal's publishing schedule up to date, this is very difficult in the face of such a severe delay, and

No more paper?

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 adopting a policy to restrict its financial support to only those journals which publish electronically. Many small, specialized journals depend upon SSHRC grants for their very existence.Last year,

Core values

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 some comparisons over time and it's a lot more sobering than initial impressions.Using Statscan's own data, albeit with more titles captured in the recent research than early in the '90s, it is