Magazines Canada: Strength in Numbers
When they grouped together under a common banner in 1973, Canadian magazine publishers had one priority: to ensure visibility in the newsstands. Magazines Canada has come a long way since then.
The advent of the Internet has changed the publishing environment, as has the professionalization of publishing practices. Today, 300 members belong to the association, English and French-language publications, large and small print runs, distributed throughout the country. Magazines Canada speaks and advocates on their behalf to the public their peers, the government, and is the guarantor of their growth.
To consolidate this network, the group opted to invest supplementary funding from the Canada Council into professional development.
The strategy: a three-part approach including the addition of workshops, a needs analysis and the development of the web site as the virtual counterpart to professional development.
In concrete terms, this translates into five one-day workshops (two in French), with more elaborate two to three-day workshops being grafted onto the existing program. Five information sheets and a fifth handbook, a human resources manual, will be produced and published in PDF format.
At the request of its network, the Magazines Canada school could offer three new programs (publication, production, small-print run magazine publishing), and envisage a virtual approach for all of its training.
All of these resources will be accessible via the Magazines Canada web site. A clearinghouse for the magazine community, it features articles, case studies and industry statistics, and enables new publishers to more easily weather their stormy first years.