Fina Scroppo – Ryerson Review of Journalism :: The Ryerson School of Journalism

Flagship of the Trade

Fina Scroppo — Sun, 03 Mar 1991 14:51:37 +0000

When Toronto Life executive editor Lynn Cunningham gets her Esquire, Saturday Night, Canadian Business and Masthead magazines on the same day, it’s Masthead she reads first. “The information is so vital to me in what I do on a day-to-day basis,” says Cunningham. “While other publications are optional reads, Masthead is a must read.” In its fourth year, Masthead magazine writes about the people in the magazine industry, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what battles they face. It’s information most industry members agree they can’t do without. “It’s hard to believe that we carried on without Masthead for so many years,” says Catherine Keachie, executive director of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association. “The CMPA thinks the world of it.” Reactions like this are smoothing Masthead’s bumpy ride over the industry’s hard times. Partly because of its acceptance, Masthead has shown a steady progress in advertising revenue. For the first time, it broke even last year. It also increased its ad pages 22 percent over 1989. That’s helped the magazine grow to a consistent 32 pages from its initial 20 pages, with one issue reaching 48 last year. And editor Doug Bennet believes it hasn’t tapped the full market yet.

“It’s becoming more and more an authority in its field and if people look at it as such, advertising success will follow,” says Martin Hochstein, president of The Auditor, a Canadian ad tracking service.

Masthead publisher Sandy Donald is confident enough to test this when he sells advertising for the magazine. In the early days, he told prospective advertisers “to pick 10 people that count in the magazine industry and phone them up and ask them if they read Masthead.” One publisher of a large firm tried it. The result: a perfect score.

But like so many publications with’ less than 50 percent of their circulation as paid, Masthead must deal with a large hike in postal rates. An issue now costs 26.25 cents to mail, an increase of 50 percent. With a circulation of 4,700-0f which only approximately 150 sellon newsstands -Masthead will be spending almost $4,000 more in postage alone.

Partly because of industry acceptance, however, Donald might have an easier battle to fight than most publishers-he’s considering the switch to paid circulation from controlled. Paul Doyle, publisher of Canadian Aviation, summarizes why Donald might make the move: “If you’re delivering a good enough product to the reader, they’ll pay for it. I’d pay for Masthead magazine because it’s a good publication and it’s a publication I have to read.” Cunningham agrees. “I would be happy to fork over whatever cost. I’d be amazed if the primary readers were reluctant to pay for it.”

Another hurdle for Masthead could be the Goods and Services Tax. As a flow through tax, the GST isn’t foreseen as a financial problem. But costs could accumulate when accounting staff sorts through the administrative paperwork the tax requires. It could also cause cash-flow problems if the government is slow in reimbursing tax credits.

Despite these obstacles, recent Masthead issues have added sections for the farm and church press in an effort to cover all areas of the industry. To create a more national content, Masthead also has a loose network of stringers in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Halifax. Some magazine representatives believe Masthead’s coverage is concentrated on the big printing houses. “A lot of things they write about tend to have some connection to Maclean Hunter,” says James Warrillow, president of Canadian Publishing at Maclean Hunter. “Then again, we are a large part of the magazine industry.”

But indisputable is Masthead’s thorough coverage of government policies like the GST, postal costs and free trade. “We have become an information source for the industry,” says Bennet. Some publishers even ask Bennet what their new postal rates will be.

Ironically, Masthead almost didn’t get born. Donald wanted a new magazine to complement his seven-year old Graphic Monthly, aimed at the Canadian graphic arts industry. The choice was between a publication that served the magazine industry or the desktop publishing field. Donald opted for the former, partly because Bennet, who was familiar with the industry, was already working for him.

Modeled on the American Folio magazine, its first issue appeared in October 1987. But Bennet emphasizes that Masthead sets itself up as a newsmagazine.

Bennet remembers the industry’s first reaction as, “What the hell is this?” He says that was partly because its founders deliberately started small and didn’t make a large announcement. Others believed it lacked a large enough marketplace. “I didn’t believe there would be enough subscription and advertising revenue to continue publishing,” says Michael de Pencier, president of Key Publishers Co. But despite the early pessimism from some members, Bennet received compliments from many.
Even de Pencier changed his first view. “It continues to be very useful for those of us in the magazine business to have a journal that covers the industry in-depth because nobody else does.”

Bennet is grateful for the positive reaction, but doesn’t stop there. “Our philosophy is not so much to just report on the industry,” he says, “but to be a part of it.”

”Just the Facts, Ma’am”

Fina Scroppo — Sun, 01 Apr 1990 19:45:34 +0000

The manila envelope on Prue Hemelrijk’s desk contains a manuscript, a landscape of computer ink on a cloudy white background When she’s finished it will be transformed into a colorful tableau, highlighted by fluorescent markers, jagged underlining, tick marks and a collage of neatly handwritten names and numbers, all contained in the one-and-a-half- inch border framing the copy.

Hemelrijk’s not the founder of a new art form, but a magazine fact-checker. Her day is filled with continuous telephone calls and doesn’t end until every fact is verified to the ultimate degree of certainty. Re-researching and even re-reporting, the fact-checker scrutinizes every name, number, place, event and quote in a magazine story. The factchecker trusts no one, rejecting reference books and newspapers as inaccurate and human sources as fallible. In the world of fact-checking, everything is wrong until proven correct. It’s a profession of precision and pettiness virtually unknown to those outside the magazine industry. But for editors and publishers, information brokers who pride themselves on accuracy, factcheckers are their best defence against threat of a libel suit.

Hemelrijk is a veteran of the fact-checking front. She stumbled on to her vocation in 1965 while working at the nowdefunct Canadian magazine. Editor Harry Bruce approached her with the idea, which was fairly novel then. “Could you do some sort of fact-checking on this?” he asked. “At Maclean’s they do this sort of thing. I don’t know what it is, but I think they check facts.”

And from these vague instructions, Hemelrijk launched a career that has spanned 25 years and numerous magazines. She is now the chief copy editor at Vista and freelances for Toronto Life and City & Country Home.

To Hemelrijk, fact-checking is like detective work, and the primary tool of the trade is diplomacy. She describes her method of dealing with sources over the phone as pussyfooting around. It’s essential, she says, to get the person she’s interviewing on her side.

“Because you’re on the phone so much, you have to be good with humans,” adds Anne “Dusty” Mortimer Maddox, one of nine fact-checkers at The New Yorker.

Mortimer-Maddox has been checking facts at The New Yorker since 1967 except for five years spent at The Atlantic, the now-defunct TO., To-, ronto Life and The Village Voice.. Diplomacy is more than a tool to Mortimer-Maddox it’ss an art. Cadence and tone are as important to her as they are to an actor. “The way you fact-check is like reading them a bedtime story. You tell peo~ pie facts rather than ask j them,” she says. “When factcheckers say, Is it true that… they come off sounding like district attorneys.”

But to an experienced fact-checker like Hemelrijk or Mortimer-Maddox, establishing a rapport with sources is only part of the job. Just as delicate is the matter of dealing with the writer. “The writer/ fact-checker relationship demands respect,” says Hemelrijk. “It’s quite possible by the time the writers winkle down the trunk full of notes, shape the story, actually write it into beautiful prose and pick out objectives, they may lose a couple of facts.” But some are so careless that Mortimer-Maddox refers to them as “fiction writers.” Others are more professional and are genuinely horrified to hear of a mistake. Their reactions vary as well some appreciate the corrections while others lack the gratitude.

Of course, fact-checkers recognize their own worth with or without approval. “We make other people look beautiful,” Mortimer-Maddox says. “We clean the egg off the writer’s face.”

The fact-checker’s contribution is rewarded in more concrete ways as well. “Today, the good ones are paid more because they’re recognized, not recognized because they’re paid more,” says Mortimer-Maddox, who wouldn’t disclose her own salary. She did say that “baby” fact-checkers at The New Yorker start at $400 a week plus overtime after 35 hours. According to Hemelrijk, the average freelance checker in Toronto asks for $20 an hour. She gets almost double that amount.

While the salary is an incentive to stay on the job, it comes only after years of experience. For Hemelrijk and Mortimer-Maddox the biggest incentive is the job itself. “{only get worn out maybe every seventeenth week or if it was raining outside or if my toe was hurting,” says Hemelrijk. “Otherwise, I really enjoy it.”