I just sent, dutifully, my letter of protest to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, copied to my local Member of Parliament, in which I express my concerns about the proposed Canadian Periodical Fund. The long and the short of the issue is that a number of Canadian government funding initiatives for magazines will be combined in the future and, unfortunately, it looks as though circulation will be used to judge applications. This is a bad idea.
The most troubling detail of what we are hearing is that a circulation of five thousand copies might be a magic number to qualify for funding. John Barton at The Malahat Review has done an excellent job getting the word out about this issue. While advertising revenues are down everywhere, magazines with circulations above five thousand qualify, in my mind, as commercial ventures that probably do not need government support.
But the real problem I see is that we are approaching this fund as a threat to the support of "little" magazines. Traditionally, as someone who studies the field, I can tell you that while "little" has become synonymous with "literary," little magazines are really startups with circulations under one thousand. Most of these magazines do not persist, and when they thrive as has Malahat, with its circulation of four thousand, they generally are generally no longer seen as "little."
I believe that we need to consolidate support for literary magazines in Canada, publications that often bring to a select audience the early work of writers who find wider acclaim and, sometimes, commercial success. It would be fabulous if there was some way to lend a hand to those smaller periodicals that aspire to the success of Malahat, but I wonder if there are not two different arguments developing here, their individual strengths weakened by weighing them together?
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