Today Seth talked about the changing relationship between Canada and the US because of our deflating dollar. The Canadian dollar is no longer the second-class citizen to our currency and its time we started making adjustments. Now, instead of us going north for a good deal, the Canucks can fly south and we should embrace that because we need all the commerce we can get right now.  However, not everyone gets it.

A directive ran through the company last week. Normally we would design 2 separate covers for our magazines, one for the newsstand and one for subscribers. The newsstand version had the prototypical US/Canada pricing difference of about $2.00. This made sense a few years ago, but not anymore. So you’d think that we’d be changing our pricing to compensate the economic change in order to not alienate our frosty neighbors. Yeah, not so much.

The directive that went through the company said we will now be producing 2 separate covers for the newsstand, one for the US and one for Canada. Are we lowering the Canadian price? Nope, just deleting the US price from the cover so Canada doesn’t feel taken advantage of when the see the pricing difference. But it gets better for Canada.

Today a second directive came down for my magazine. How about a $1 increase in pricing Canada? They won’t mind. Are we raising the US price? Oh no, we couldn’t do that to our citizens. We only need to rip off those outside our borders. But it gets better.

How about we reduce the actual size of the magazine in order to save money on printing? We’re also going to cut the amount of pages as much as possible because ad revenue isn’t what it used to be. Oh, and did I mention that we’re reducing the quality of paper to something that resembles grayish toilet tissue.

Now Canada, don’t you worry about all this. With all your new found income, I’m sure you can afford the price increases. You should feel good about buying our overpriced, reduced quality magazines because we’re doing our part to prevent global warming. We recycle!

It’s almost comedy how foolish the company acts under pressure of actually making a few dollars (or a few dollars more, rather). We depend on the enthusiasts to keep buying our mags yet we do everything we can to not give them their monies worth. Thankfully I work on a magazine where quality content is the most important thing we can do, but as our pages get cut month after month, it gets harder to deliver the best stories. As the book gets thinner, so do the stories, so readers lose out even further.

I’ve written before about magazines and newspapers going the way of the Dodo, but consented that niche magazines would maintain longer because we speak to specific readers. After a conversation with a company veteran, I realized that we’ve been losing ground for years. The internet is quite possibly the single most destructive force in the demise of publishing and its getting worse every year. We still sell the same percentage of magazines, but we’re putting fewer copies out on stands. Advertisers are realizing that they’re losing money by placing ads with us, or breaking even at best, which is as good as losing. Of course these factors are apparent to the higher-ups, but instead of innovating and coming up with new ways to answer the problem, we cut pages and cut budgets and charge more for our services.

For the first time in awhile, I feel like my days as a magazine art director are numbered. What will I do when magazine publishing is dead?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!