As someone who’s fascinated by magazines as both expressions of and influences upon culture, I wanted to learn more about this insignia. I was intrigued that they were specifically said to be Canadian – and Genuine at that! This required investigation. What I learned made me reconsider the relationships among government, magazines, and innovation.

It turns out that the insignia is used by many of the Canadian magazines that receive funding from the Canada Periodical Fund’s CA$75 million Aid to Publishers program. This government program supports “Canadian print magazines, non-daily newspapers and digital periodicals to enable them to overcome market disadvantages and continue to provide Canadian readers with the content they choose to read” (source). The Fund is administered by the Department of Canadian Heritage. You can see a display of covers of some of the funded magazines (hit reload for another random array).

There is also a separate Business Innovation funding program for small and medium-sized publishers, and a Collective Initiatives program for industry-wide research and planning. Magazines Canada, the Canadian equivalent of MPA in the U.S., promotes the Genuine Canadian Magazine campaign to its members as well.

I knew that Canada has regulations that aim to ensure the expression of a distinctive Canadian identity within the nation’s media, but I didn’t know that magazines were included; I’d heard only about the broadcasting rules in the past.

Though the magazine subsidy programs have met some controversy, it’s fascinating to see which magazines are funded (even some from huge corporations, e.g., Rogers, which publishes newsmagazine Maclean’s), and how arts/literary and ethnic magazines have been affected.

These programs are also an acknowledgement that magazines play an important cultural role, even as print is fading. I find people often to be dismissive of this medium (“You study what?!”), but magazines are still significant in building our understanding of social and political reality, particularly within our specific places — which is why Canada values its genuine Canadian magazines and media.

I’d also like to imagine what independent American magazines could be and do with subsidies for innovative projects. I personally wouldn’t want to see funds allocated to major corporate publishers, but wouldn’t it be an interesting development in the U.S. to see indie magazine publishers able to access such funding?

I’m venturing into the debate over government subsidies of journalism here, but I think they are an increasingly real prospect; after all, as magazines increasingly become digital products, postal subsidies (which have already diminished) are less relevant. We should find other ways government might support quality magazines in the digital age. What could small magazine publishers achieve with even a small grant to support innovation? Perhaps they could lead the way with creative, open approaches to digital publishing, instead of having to ride the coattails of major publishers, for whom profit will be the prime consideration, into the digital age. This might be one way to ensure we have magazines with genuinely distinctive identities and financially sustainable operations, well into the digital future.

Photo by Dean Meyers on Flickr.

I recently read Reuters’ new guidelines for their journalists’ use of social media.

Here’s a paragraph that stood out for me:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

I find it highly interesting that Reuters acknowledges their journalists’ desire to have a personal brand here. I don’t think I’ve seen an explicit reference to that emerging reality in any other media company’s social media policies/guidelines so far. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that, please.)

I recently wrote in an academic paper about the increasingly real dilemma that both journalists and their employers will face in balancing individual brands with corporate brands, particularly with regard to the use of social media to establish both. I think that as today’s young journalists come into the profession – especially those who graduate from journalism programs where personal branding and entrepreneurship are emphasized – it may be challenging to find a happy medium between using social media for self-promotion and for corporate promotion.

Can corporate policies like this one help journalists strike that balance by reminding everyone of the significance of both brands? Or does having a social media policy restrict individuals’ ability to establish their own personal brands, to the degree that they begin to resent their employers?

Overall, Reuters’ policy emphasizes the individual journalist’s role in using social media responsibly, and doesn’t set out many strict rules, suggesting instead a string of things to “think about” when using social media. It’s good to see their trust in their employees’ critical faculties, rather than some of the more draconian approaches to social media that other media organizations have employed, though Reuters does still warn that “your manager and/or senior editors will retrospectively review your professional output” and that “We reserve the right to change your beat or responsibilities if there are problems in this area. In the case of serious breaches, we may use our established disciplinary procedures.”

This question isn’t really a problem just for journalism, of course; other professions will also face the challenge of managing employees’ commitment to “take care of No. 1″ – their own personal brands – as well as their employers’, especially when long-term stable employment seems more and more a thing of the past.

Though social media policies, other than Reuters’ version, don’t yet seem to address this dilemma in quite these terms, it appears likely that this will be a more relevant issue as our workforce becomes increasingly reliant on short-term, freelance and contract projects. After all, if one’s employer isn’t going to take care of you in the long run, then you might be prepared to do it yourself, no matter what you have to tweet.

Subscription cards from four of the magazines I receive: Sunset, Smithsonian, Triathlete and Make, all priced around $30/year.

Magazines have a serious dilemma in pricing subscriptions:

1. What’s the maximum price readers will pay? (Or, how much is this magazine experience worth to them?)
2. What’s the minimum price that will generate profit, or supplement advertising revenue adequately to add up to a profit?
3. What’s the minimum price that still communicates that the product is quality and has value?

An interesting post recently at Ad Age suggests that, although low prices might appeal to readers, magazines that cut their subscription rates may not gain subscribers; they might even lose them.

As magazines have lost circulation dramatically of late, subscription revenue will likely become increasingly important to replace declining ad revenue. However, readers are slicing away unnecessary expenses themselves – with magazine and newspaper subscriptions likely among the casualties.

I’m certainly a magazine enthusiast, and when I find a subscription card offering me a magazine for $1 an issue, that $12 per year for a fresh magazine experience is pretty tempting.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that – as the Ad Age piece calls it – I often become part of the “marginal readership” of the magazine if I take the plunge and buy the cheap subscription. I haven’t invested enough to feel motivated to take the time to read the magazine unless it turns out to be quite appealing.

When I have spent a lot of money (for me) on a subscription, as with The New Yorker, I’ve felt serious guilt over not being able to read every issue faithfully. I feel like I’ve let down my “pledge” to become a reader and am disappointed in myself and my failure to follow through on my spending. (Yes, I tend to be hard on myself; can you tell?) So, the greater the subscription expense, the greater my desire to fully invest myself in that magazine experience. The expense isn’t the only determinant of my reading enthusiasm, of course, but it is a factor.

This phenomenon is one reason why I’d argue that many magazines should charge more for their content. I think readers “buy into” a magazine’s uniquely constructed experience and offerings, and want to become part of its community through reading. Undervaluing that experience by putting a small price tag on it also undermines the sense of worth that readers ascribe to their participation with the magazine – and, as side effects, could diminish their loyalty as subscribers and their attention to advertising messages within the magazine.

In these times, magazines need to do everything possible to maintain their existing subscribers and attract new ones. Counterintuitively, the best way to do that might be to keep subscription prices at current levels or raise them slightly.

Of course, I’d also be willing to spend more on magazines to fund better content and to liberate magazines from the many editorial constraints they experience as a result of their reliance on advertising. I’d also like customizable magazines and other innovations. And, of course, it would be great to see magazines on iPads that are awesomely designed. I’ve written about all those things here. And if publishers want to have the funding to make those things happen, they need to communicate to the audience that their monetary investment is necessary to continue the creation of terrific magazine products.

My one nagging question, though, is whether it’s fair to raise subscription prices and inevitably price some readers out of the opportunity to participate in magazine readership. Would raising prices create a certain elitism around magazine subscriptions? (Maybe that already exists?)

Perhaps the growing field of print-on-demand magazines, along with the digitizing of magazines, eventually will lead to such efficiency in the publishing and distribution process that prices will adjust accordingly and remain accessible to a variety of readers. It may be that as these new approaches develop, the act of subscribing to a magazine will look so different that these concerns are no longer relevant.

One well-known crowdfunding project for journalism is Spot.Us. This organization provides a platform for public donations to proposed stories in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Potential donors can read a pitch for the story, follow the reporter’s blog and see other content related to the proposed story.

I’m afraid, though, that it’s a bit optimistic to expect the audience to evaluate, donate to, and follow up on stories at the international, national, state and local levels, as would really be needed to make this model widespread and effective throughout journalism. Not only is it a financial commitment, but it’s also a time commitment that goes beyond what most people will consider for news. I doubt most people will make this investment in news, especially given current levels of public appreciation for journalism.

It seems to me that if this model is to succeed, it needs to look at another model of investments that has been very successful: the mutual fund. As I see it, today’s crowdfunding possibilities – limited as they are – are like individual stock investments, with a “socially responsible investing” angle. A donor chooses to donate to X story because he or she feels that it has long-term value for a personal information “portfolio” and for a community.

But just like investing in individual stocks, picking those stories is a lot of work. People like mutual funds for their financial investments because they eliminate that detailed effort. In a mutual fund, a trusted manager with a proven track record is given funds to allocate based on a chosen model of investment. Many different mutual funds exist: some that are more risky, some that are less so, some that invest in particular industries and some that express particular ideological perspectives.

Maybe this is how crowdfunding could be approached – as a news mutual fund, rather than as a stock-picking process. Spot.Us does provide an option to simply donate money and allow the organization to choose where the funds are assigned. But little transparency is provided – as far as I can tell – as to how that selection is made.

In a news mutual fund, a manager would determine where news investors’ money was directed according to defined story selection parameters.

Sound like an editor? Does a news mutual fund sound a bit like buying a newspaper subscription and hoping your money goes to the “right” stories? Sure.

But most of the audience doesn’t know how editors select stories, and they have never had any input into that process. A more open “news mutual fund” process would lead to greater credibility and audience engagement, while eliminating the detail work on the audience’s behalf of doing the story selection work themselves. It would also maintain a degree of audience accountability for the manager, because if stories began to deviate from the investors’ chosen parameters, they could redirect their money to a different news fund.

I’m sure there are weaknesses to this model as well, just as there are in mutual fund investing, so the option to invest in individual stories – some of which could be collaborations among news producers – should still be available.

In a post on MediaShift, Spot.Us founder David Cohn noted that the site was able to fully fund a project that did not yet have a reporter assigned to it, meaning that the site’s managers developed the idea and then, once it was funded, could hire a freelancer to work on it. He says that the logistics of this process are much easier for the site, and also open up the chance to market the story to traditional news organizations that could reimburse Spot.Us its funding in exchange for first publication rights to the story. So here’s a case where Spot.Us could operate like the news mutual fund manager that I’m envisioning here. They control the funds and their allocation, and have already told the audience how this money will be spent. The development of the story, its assignment and its distribution would ideally be equally transparent through updates provided on the site.

The crowdfunding model for journalism is still in its early days, and there will no doubt be lots of experimentation. Testing the public’s willingness to invest in news is a daunting (and somewhat frightening) task, but with a variety of approaches, it might turn out to be an exciting and engaging process for journalists and the audience both.