The Canadian Periodical Fund is a new government program merging the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program.
CMF provides money to magazines for creating editorial content and business development, and also funds industry organizations. PAP provides a postal subsidy to fund some of the mailing costs for nearly 1200 publications.

The CPF aims to give financial support to Canadian magazines, rewarding them based on their successes. It will set out new rules for determining which magazines are eligible for government funding. One of the new requirements is that a publication must have a circulation of at least 5,000. This rule would adversely affect many arts and literary magazines in Canada that have a circulation of less than 5,000. In my opinion, this requirement is a terrible idea. Our country needs these small publications to support cultural growth, and many of them need government assistance to grow and survive. Funding for these magazines is shrinking, and this decision needs to be reversed.

What do you think? Post your comments below.

No, not this kind of lozenge

The yellow lozenge, that sunshine circle stamped on magazine covers to promote a price, an offer, or some other “good deal,” has appeared frequently on the cover of the Canadian edition of Hello! magazine since the price was dramatically lowered a few years back. Hello! has been priced at $3.49 for a while now, but the price is set to rise to $3.99 on March 26. This begs the question: is the yellow lozenge still a good idea when your price point reaches nearly $4.00?

I think it is. The yellow lozenge often signals out a magazine’s cheap cover price. Case in point: cheaply priced magazines like In Touch, OK! and Life & Style swear by the lozenge, while more expensive celebrity mags like US and People avoid it. What makes Hello!  unique is its position in between these two categories. The magazine straddles the line between cheap celebrity gossip and pricier smut. Hello!  is a larger format than People and US, with glossy photos galore, but it’s also less expensive than these magazines. Using a yellow lozenge points this out to potential readers, draws them in, and helps them buy into the idea that they’re getting more bang for their buck — which of course they are.

What do you think? Are yellow lozenges trashy or truly necessary? And what might be the online equivalent of a yellow lozenge — something that draws readers in with unexpected colour and a bold message? Post your comments below!

The Lozenge is King

Mary Gaitskill’s new collection of stories, Don’t Cry, is finally being released today. I’ve been waiting for a new book by Gaitskill for what seems like ages, although really it’s only been less than four years since her excellent novel Veronica. But anyway, this got me to thinking about anticipation. Waiting for a new book to come out — or a movie or album for that matter — can be a frustrating experience. You anticipate something so long and hard that sometimes your brain gets worn out and you forget all about it.

This happened to me recently. After reading Blake Bailey’s good-but-so-depressing biography of Richard Yates a few years ago, I was excited to hear that he’d been hired to write a new biography of John Cheever. I marked the release date in the calendar inside my brain (stored within the squishy part), and waited. And then I waited some more. Finally, I forgot all about it until I happened to see the book at a local bookshop a few weeks ago. As it happens, someone had mistakenly put the book out too soon, and I grabbed my copy in advance of the actual release date.

And this is where the internet plays an important part in reminding people to go pick up whatever book they were anticipating, but then forgot. In Gaitskill’s case, for instance, a recent issue of The Believer magazine featured an interesting piece with Sheila Heti interviewing the Bad Behavior author. The print edition of the magazine carried the interview, but I found it online (here).  In Cheever’s case — or rather, Bailey’s — if I hadn’t chanced past the book in a store (and it would’ve been hard to miss — the thing is Bible-fat), there were reviews of the work appearing concurrently with the books’ launch in high profile outlets like The New Yorker and Harper’s. Again, although these were magazine pieces, they were circulated online too. 

All this is to say that the buzz-generating machine is working, and that there’s obviously value in reproducing the print versions of magazines in a complete and easily accessed form. 

So what are the best ways to generate buzz for new publications? How do you create excitement, anticipation, and best of all, renewed anticipation?

Post your thoughts below!

Let’s discuss this! Post your comments below.

NOT HOMESICKNESS, BUT AWAYSICKNESS

There’s an aspect of travel that makes me depressed. It has to do with returning home only to find myself wondering whether I ever left in the first place. I don’t think I’m alone in this freakish experience. Something about the nature of airline travel is unsettling—it’s the ease with which you slip in and out of distant landscapes simply by being locked inside a stale-air chamber for a few hours. And then there’s the matter of life at home quickly returning to normal. Because you miss what you’ve discovered in some far away place, you recoil into a kind of ugly solipsism. It’s easier to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist than to admit that there are distant things you long for, but can’t have.

One thing I found myself longing for, in the aftermath of a trip to Turkey last summer, was yogurt. And not just any old yogurt. In the spirit of reliving my trip—and proving to myself that it had really happened—I ended up hovering over my kitchen sink, vigorously whipping a concoction of store-bought yogurt and Toronto tap water. I was trying to see if it was really possible to recreate a food experience, and it was all in the name of ayran.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH AYRAN?

The drink ayran is basically a type of watered-down plain yogurt. The stuff is really salty—it consists, according to most recipes, of a mixture of yogurt and cold water, plus a “discretionary” amount of salt. The salt makes the drink a difficult adjustment, but it’s also what makes it addictive. Salty foods might make you crave sweet foods as a counterpoint, but what salt really gives you an appetite for is more salt, and the more you drink ayran, the more you want to keep drinking it.

In part, the addictive nature of ayran is a matter of climate. As Cookie Cavendish, a fellow traveller whom I met in Turkey, recalls, “Ayran gives you life force in the heat.” In the soaring temperatures of a Turkish summer, ayran is both cooling and necessary—the drink quenches your thirst and reanimates you, replenishing the salts your body has lost after intense sweating. Of course the drink is popular in Turkey year-round, even when the weather isn’t abusively warm, but for me at least, a huge part of the drink’s appeal was the way it helped fight off heat-induced exhaustion.

There’s also the fact of its ubiquity in Turkey. Ayran is available practically everywhere, and I came to depend on it the way you might come to depend on some stranger you’ve met for companionship (in my case, a guy from New Zealand who wore the same pants for three consecutive weeks). What began as a kind of casual courtship with the drink became a weird fascination bordering on obsession. Whenever I made it to a new town, I’d head straight for the ayran. I’d point to it on the menu and the waiter would know what I wanted. Ayran! Yes! Good!

Another great thing about ayran is that its presence isn’t limited to Turkey. It’s available throughout the Balkans and the Middle East in some form or another. Sometimes it goes by a different name, but the taste is essentially the same. I drank ayran all over Turkey, but I also drank a version of it in Syria, and Jordan too. This got me to thinking: why is it that yogurt is so common in this part of the world? Why is it all over the place, in the form of drinks or otherwise tucked into meals? The English word “yogurt,” it turns out, comes from the Turkish yoğurt, which seems to have something to do with kneading or mixing. The history of yogurt itself is fuzzy, but its discovery was probably accidental, and although it was likely discovered at different times in different regions of the world, the people in the area now known as Turkey, and the area immediately surrounding this, have been eating yogurt for thousands of years. Yogurt is a key ingredient in the diet of this region’s people—it’s nutritious, a good source of calcium and protein, and it’s easily made (you can even make it at home). Plain yogurt is healthier than the flavoured kind we tend to eat in North America, since it has more protein, and doesn’t contain added sugar. One theory behind the history of ayran suggests that it was developed as a means of preserving yogurt, since the addition of salt kept the yogurt from turning.  

A COMMERCIAL FOR AYRAN:

AYRAN IN CANADA

The popularity of ayran, and other drinks like it, would seem to suggest that it might be easily available in Canada. This isn’t the case. After becoming accustomed to drinking ayran on a daily basis, I came home feeling dejected, knowing that my life would be more or less ruined if I couldn’t drink ayran anymore. So I began my search for the beverage, first in my kitchen, and later in a restaurant at the outskirts of the city.

Finding a recipe for ayran isn’t difficult. I couldn’t find any ready-made ayran in any food shop in the city, but browsing through some Turkish cookbooks, and even searching the internet, yielded many recipes for what is basically a preposterously simple process:

Ingredients:

Plain yogurt, Cold water

Directions:

Take the plain yogurt, add the cold water—maybe some ice—and whip these ingredients until you have a consistent mixture. Then add salt.

Armed with a recipe, I set out to produce several versions of ayran, using different types of plain yogurt. I tried fat-free yogurt, 2% yogurt, 3.25% yogurt, and Balkan-style. Each version produced a slightly different drink, though the differences were negligible (except for the Balkan-style ayran, which was disgusting). Standing in my kitchen, drinking mixtures of tap water and yogurt, some a little creamier than others, I felt dissatisfied and not a little bit crestfallen.

Part of the problem with my homemade ayran, I thought, was the lack of context. I wasn’t used to drinking ayran in an apartment on a rainy autumn day, paired with cereal, which is what I usually eat at home. In Turkey, the heat was scorching, the people were plentiful, and the food was, well, Turkish. After some more searching on the internet, I found a Turkish restaurant that serves ayran. One soggy afternoon I visited this establishment, ordering a glass of ayran and some gözleme—Turkish pancakes. When the waitress brought me my drink, I asked her if it was homemade. She assured me that it was, and I took a sip. The ayran was cold, creamy, and slightly salted—it tasted, I thought, more or less how I’d remembered it.

EVEN BETTER THAN THE REAL THING?

The thing with memories is that they’re mostly distortions. In the same way that a photograph will recall an event, but will also replace that event, so that the person remembering some moment in time remembers not the moment itself but rather the photograph taken, so too does the taste of food in some way come to replace the original memory it contained. The ayran from the restaurant was homemade, and in point of fact it didn’t taste all that different from the stuff I’d made at home. But the context of my surroundings helped. The Turkish restaurant, with its ambience, and the food, and my own willingness to believe—these things urged me to accept that what I was drinking was the real deal. Did the ayran in the restaurant really taste the same as the stuff in Turkey? I couldn’t say. The point is that I chose to pursue those memories—I wanted to recreate my experiences so that I wouldn’t forget them.

Will I be drinking ayran on a regular basis from now on? Probably not. Unsurprisingly, most of the food we eat is largely determined by context, and by what we’ve grown up with. When we travel, we’re more likely to adapt, to try new things, and to enjoy foods we might not otherwise be willing to consider. This is what makes travel interesting. International food shops, restaurants, and cookbooks all exist to sate the appetites of people who long for a bit of variety, for difference. But it’s harder than you think to incorporate something different into your daily routine. The concept of home is both deeply specific and largely arbitrary—we’re born somewhere, and we learn to live the way we do because of that location. I wouldn’t want to drink ayran everyday because I don’t live in Turkey, and it isn’t what I’m accustomed to. If I drink it, from time to time, it’s so that I can revive the memories of my trip, and remind myself that there’s a whole world out there, waiting to be discovered. But most of the time, I’ll have what I’ve had all my life: a bowl of Count Chocula and a tall glass of Metamucil.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Have you tried ayran? Did you love it? Have you ever been obsessed with yogurt? What are some yogurt-related foods you enjoy? Any recipes? Share your thoughts below!

The Walrus Magazine

The Walrus magazine’s website incorporates many web2.0 features. These include: RSS options, an assortment of blogs, podcasts, online-exclusive content, and bookmarking tools (links to Share This!, Buzz Up!, Facebook, and StumbleUpon). The purpose of these web2.0 tools is to allow the reader-user to share content from The Walrus online, which both generates a wider audience for The Walrus and provides the reader-user with a chance to interact with the content, since she is able to distribute, manage, and comment on it as she sees fit. This element of participation is crucial because it captivates the user’s attention and helps to develop a loyal following for the magazine, as well as a kind of online “buzz”—it ensures that The Walrus is receiving as much exposure as possible, be it through bookmarking sites, mentions on an individual’s blog, or other types of sharing tools.

These web2.0 features are valuable to publishers and editors because they guarantee an increase in online readership, which could translate into increased subscription and newsstand sales. The same is true for marketers and advertisers, who are obviously interested in an increase in profitability. Whenever these tools assist in increasing the web presence of a magazine, the end result is that more people are seeing the advertisements online and in print. Also, because online-exclusive content can be tailored to complement advertisements, advertisers can benefit from the additional exposure not available in print form. Since users are able to share this online-exclusive content within their online community, the exposure is greater, and the likelihood of response to the advertisements is probably greater, since users are more likely to visit an advertiser’s website if they can click on the link immediately, as opposed to having to search for an advertiser’s site after having seen an ad in print form. 

The New Yorker

The New Yorker’s website also makes use of a variety of web2.0 tools. For example, there are exclusive New Yorker blogs, podcasts, and video files. None of this material is available through the print version of the magazine, but all of it is faithful to the tone and focus of the print version, making these features desirable for current readers but also providing greater exposure for the magazine in a more easily distributed format, since users can share this content—for example, by posting one of the videos on their own blogs. The value of blogs and podcasts, apart from the innate value of their content, is in their timeliness. These are of-the-moment features that are updated on a regular basis. If users subscribe to, say, a podcast, then they will automatically be retained as audience members because they will receive new podcasts whenever they become available. Because the content is timely, it is more likely to be shared/distributed online, where things move quickly. The New Yorker blogs and podcasts take advantage of the magazine’s excellent reputation in order to increase audience numbers, which is good for publishers, editors, advertisers and marketers alike. 

The same is true for the RSS feed component—users are able to guarantee that they stay up to date on the latest that the magazine has to offer, which fosters loyalty to the magazine and, again, generates buzz. And of course buzz translates into dollars. (Mathematical formula: B + z² = $$$). The bookmarking tool employed by The New Yorker online, a button from Add This.com, provides a pop-up window with links to a huge array of bookmarking and social networking tools. Reader-users can share most of the content on the website in such places as Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Bookmarks. The bottom line here is that this website provides the user with ample opportunity to share content, which means that the magazine—and thus, its advertisers—receives an enormous amount of exposure. 

Bust

The Bust website goes to great lengths to provide the reader-user with a kind of agency in that she is able to modify and contribute to the magazine’s online counterpart. The user is able to have a tangible effect on the focus and details of the online magazine, since much of the content is user-directed. Apart from some of the user-focused content of the site, such as free e-mail accounts (“Bust She-Mail”), e-cards, and streaming video (“BustTV”), Bust online employs some unique user-directed features. For instance, the “Bust lounge” is an online forum where registered users can discuss topics related to the magazine’s content, creating their own “Bust blogs.” This page provides statistics detailing how many users are currently online at any given time, and who has contributed to blog postings. This information is valuable for advertisers because they are able to see exactly how many people they are reaching, and who these people are. 

Bust magazine online also features a section called “Girl Wide Web,” which is itself a kind of bookmarking tool. Users provide links to sites of interest to readers of Bust, and other users are able to rate the appropriateness of these links. The categories here range from “Art” and “Books and Media” to “Politics” and “Erotica and Porn.” The site also features a calendar tool called “Hot Dates,” which allows users to log in and add events of interests for other readers to learn about. These events are tagged according to their natures (example: “feminist” vs. “crafty”). The advantage of all these features is that they allow the user to have an impact on content, and they also encourage the user to share the content of the magazine itself. Thus, while users can share content from the magazine with links to Digg, Fark, Technorati, Kirtsy, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., they are further encouraged to distribute the content because they have had contributed to some aspect of the website itself. Thus the Bust website is both an add-on to the print version of the magazine and itself a kind of community, which helps to promote the Bust brand, which in turn makes advertisers feel confident partnering with this magazine.