I agree with this funding cut. If these magazines can’t survive on advertising and subscription, then should they really exist? They need to find other models and stop depending on taxpayer money. Go online-only, cut the number of pages or issues, anything. The government should stop funding all Canadian magazines in my opinion.

Whoa grumpy bear, as much as I respect USA today, I’d like some other reading material, perhaps something pertaining to my own situation and geographic location.

Not saying that people shouldn’t strive to be autonomously funded, but literary magazines are an important part of culture and the literary sphere in Canada, to wipe out the vast majority of them is sort of extreme, to say the least.

And I think Canada should stop being involved in unnecessary wars with taxpayer money, but what can you do, huh?

I didn’t say that they should be wiped out. I said that they should learn to exist without taxpayer money. If that means that only a few of the best ones like The Malahat or TNQ survive, so be it. If these magazines can’t afford to exist without taxpayer money, then they aren’t really a thriving culture, are they? To be a culture they would need to be heavily and willingly a part of the majority’s lifestyle. The Beaver has been around since before there were government grants and does just fine. I am an aspiring writing and subscribe to and submit to a few of these magazines, but I don’t want to be taxed to pay for them a second time around after already paying for my subscription. Raise the subscription price if you want more money.

What wars you mean I don’t know. Perhaps you are opposed to our involvement in WWII or NATO, who knows and to be honest I don’ care. Our wars are influence by more than just domestic involvement.

An aspiring writer* who’s okay with there being fewer avenues for his work to be noticed, in order to pay fewer taxes? I hope you like pitching stories to the Canadian editions of Cosmo and Cat Fancy, because that’s what your tax dollars will most likely be funding instead. Otherwise you’d better be an Alice Munro or George Elliott Clarke. If you aren’t, I can only say get thee to Lulu.com, because without those little mags it’s the only way your work is going to see print.

*I’ve always felt that a writer is something you are, regardless of publication credits. If you’re aspiring to be a working writer, don’t worry about where your tax dollars go; in this country you probably won’t make enough money to have to pay taxes anyway.

Hi August,

I am an aspiring poet and I don’t plan on making money from my poetry. I run a business as well. As I noted above, I don’t believe that government funding should be given to any magazine, Cosmo, Malahat, whatever. Are you saying then that taxpayers should support writers and writing that we wouldn’t otherwise pay for? Is the writing that bad? That anyone who starts up a magazine should get funding just because it is a magazine? how far does your flawed logic go? does something deserve money just because it is “art”? There is probably a reason we won’t pay for it: the writing is bad, or we would rather be reading, or heaven forbid, doing, other things.

I am fine with their being fewer avenues for my work. I won’t name names, but I will tell you I have taken a look at every literary journal sellable in this country and some of them are just plain garbage. Perhaps you will try and say there is no such thing as a common standard of good writing and so all of these magazines are worthwhile and fundable, and that all artists are equal and should live in one big socialist fantasy. It seems you do have a streak of the defeatist in you as you are already saying “don’t plan on making money.” I don’t believe in your version of Canadian art and writing.

Michael,

Three things you should consider:

First, my statement about writers not making money isn’t defeatist, it’s realist. A report for the Writer’s Union of Canada from 2007 by Maggie Siggins states:

“Current studies indicate that creators still struggle to get their fair share. In 2005 the Professional Writers Association of Canada found that the average annual pre-tax income of respondent freelancers to its survey of members and non-members, including part-time freelancers who have other jobs, was approximately $21,000. The average 2005 income reported by Prairie periodical writers was $22,284, slightly more than periodical writers in Ontario and British Columbia but less than periodical writers in Quebec, whose average income of $24,082 made them the highest-earning freelancers in Canada. Most self-employed writers in Canada today must supplement their writing with other work. This is even more necessary for book writers than it is for periodical writers.”

Now, there’s any number of reasons these incomes are so low. Writing is quite clearly a buyer’s market, meaning that there will always be far more writers trying to sell their work than there will be editors to buy it (assuming that they actually pay for the work; a great many arts periodicals–and this is true world-wide, not just in Canada, don’t pay for submissions–even McSweeney’s didn’t in the early years), and therefore only a handful of “name” writers will command high wages outside of certain tightly checked industries. There are always exceptions (some periodicals pay extremely well as a matter of course), but that’s all they are: exceptions.

Another reason this might be so is market size: Canada doesn’t have a market large enough to sustain its magazines. I don’t just mean its arts magazines, I mean almost any of them. Even large commercial magazines receive funding in Canada, and for that reason, among others. Distribution costs are extremely high, and the cliché that our populations and therefore readership is spread thin across a vast geographic area is quite true. You may wish to ignore that reality, and point to examples of our Southern cousins sustaining arts magazines without government assistance (not entirely true, but let’s run with it anyway). Take McSweeney’s, and enormously popular arts magazine, and their recent San Francisco Panorama issue. It sold out, from what I hear, so you’d think they made a killing, right? I mean, Stephen-Bloody-King and other big names were involved. But, no, no killings were made. Ed Champion wrote an excellent piece on why not (http://www.edrants.com/dave-eggers-and-the-journalism-sweatshop-model/), and here’s an excerpt:

“But the more important question of whether the San Francisco Panorama was profitable was swept under the rug. Then last month, The Awl’s Choire Sicha took a hard look at the numbers, pointing out that the Panorama required $111,000 to publish 23,000 issues. With advertising revenue of $61,000, the Panorama took a loss of 33 cents per issue. Additional problems came from the $80,000 editorial costs, which, as Sicha demonstrated, had to be split among 218 contributors. After subtracting an estimated 12 cents/word paid for contributions, noted Sicha, there was a mere $38,000 for the seven staff members, who all worked on the paper for four months. How many of the people who worked on the Panorama were unpaid?”

Wow, twelve cents a word. That’s a penny more than I made a few years ago when I did some freelance work for our own venerable Globe and Mail, by the way. What Ed’s piece doesn’t say is that McSweeney’s has always been, and probably will continue to be for a long time to come, subsidized by Eggers’ personal fortune, its original source being (as anyone who’s read his first book will know) insurance money from the tragic deaths of his parents, and not royalties from his books (though those are no doubt substantial). I want you to remember that this substantial subsidy from a man’s personal fortune is required for a popular, successful, influential journal in a market a hundred times bigger than ours in Canada. A hundred times!

But you’re still not convinced, so let’s move on to something else. You mentioned increasing revenue streams from advertising, or raising subscription fees (never mind that raising subscription fees often serves to reduce readership). What you may not realize is that a great many arts periodicals, for one reason or another–often related to how and why they were founded–are not businesses in the traditional sense. Many of them are in fact non-profit organizations, or projects of those organizations (such as The Walrus, though so far as I know they are actually one magazine that doesn’t take government grants, and they can’t make it with a subscriber/advertising model alone either), and therefore have pretty strict rules about how they generate their income, and what percentage can come from what sources. You may be shocked to learn, for example, to learn that certain periodicals simply *cannot* increase the number of ads that appear in their pages.

But I can tell you’re still not convinced that any of this means they deserve funding. Well, you mentioned that The New Quarterly will go on without funding, and because I’ve known both editor Kim Jernigan and managing editor Rosalynn Tyo for many years, and conversations with Rosalynn in particular (also from posts on their blog) have led me to believe that TNQ could not hope to survive without financial assistance, and that this cut, though not deadly, will definitely hurt.

It comes down, I think, largely to what you think a healthy Canadian culture looks like, and whether you think the government has an interest in supporting it. There are an astonishing number of examples as to why the invisible hand of the market fails in other areas (not just the recent financial problems associated with selling bad debt and the deregulation of the futures market), and even Adam Smith believed that the market would become a malevolent, devouring force without an ethical framework to guide it. Support for local cultural projects is something I believe is part of a healthy ethical framework, but then I also tend to think that a lot of what sells well is utter garbage.

On an interesting side-note, do you know why you see so few Canadian films in theatres? You might think it’s because nobody will pay to see them, but that’s actually got very little to do with it. It’s because we’ve removed the protections for local culture, and most of the cinemas in Canada are either owned by American film interests, or have been backed into a corner by lack of local support, and often have deals wherein they are actually financially penalized for giving screen time to films that don’t come from American distributors. We have issues here related to being next door to a “culture industry” juggernaut that have nothing to do with quality, or value to local citizens, and everything to do with ceding control over channels of distribution. And that’s one of the many things I think government funding of small arts periodicals is all about: keeping local channels of distribution in local hands.

I doubt I’ve said anything to convince you, but I hope at least you now realize that it’s a much, much bigger issue than simply “if people want it they will pay for it”.

Michael: Afghanistan. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m just saying we don’t all agree what the government spends their money on. Literary magazines are art. The same way the government gives out art grants, funds CBC productions, gives grants to artists to create music videos, literary magazines should be funded.