Thursday, February 19, 2009

There goes the Canadian small-press magazine industry

Quill & Quire Online just reported:
The Harper Tories have promised to maintain existing funding levels for the country’s magazine industry ($75.5-million annually), but guidelines announced this week for the new Canada Periodical Fund could put Canada’s small-run literary magazines in jeopardy.

The new Canadian Heritage-run program merges two other federal funding bodies – the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program – in an effort to streamline operations and tie support of the periodical sector to “the reading choices of Canadians.” This new system won’t become a reality until at least 2010, but when it does, funds will be allocated using a formula based on paid circulation, and magazines with less then 5,000 annual subscribers will be shut out altogether.
(For my non-Canadian readers, Harper is Stephen Harper, Canada's current prime minister; the Tories are the ruling, but minority, Conservative party.)

What a typically conservative approach: let's give the money to those who need it least.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

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3 Comments:

At February 19, 2009 11:42 PM , Blogger Adam Israel said...

That really, really sucks. We are planning to start a small press magazine once we moved to Canada later this year (I'm applying for PR; my wife is Canadian). We'd talked about taking advantage of that kind of funding.

 
At February 20, 2009 5:23 PM , Blogger zafri said...

seems a little bit backwards doesn't it? good old tories.

 
At February 20, 2009 9:20 PM , Blogger Dwight Williams said...

No arguments there. Masthead(devoted to covering the domestic magazine industry) just went web-only, and I'm concerned about several others: Spacing(on ethical urban redevelopment), Branchline, CN Lines and Canadian Rail(all covering what else? Railways!), ByWords(Ottawa region poetry)...

 

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