Steve Ladurantaye

Rogers Media wants you to suspend your sense of reality and accept that Paulina Gretzky is a very controversial celebrity worthy of not only the cover of its flagship fashion magazine but also a prime-time special on its television network.

It’s sort of like believing in dragons and dwarves so you can enjoy The Hobbit, but with more cleavage.

It doesn’t matter that the rest of the world has never been all that interested in the antics of the 24-year-old woman whose principal claim to fame is that her father was a really good hockey player. That’s not entirely fair – she’s probably just as well known for her provocative Instagram photos.

Ok, that’s probably the main reason.

“You may know of her because your boyfriend follows her,” writer Olivia Stren patiently explains to Flare’s readers, who are presumably trying to understand why they should care about the daughter of a hockey player who retired more than a decade ago.

Editor Miranda Purves also felt the need to explain her choice of cover subject to readers, taking to the magazine’s website Monday to remind everyone that “one person’s de trop is another person’s just right.”

“Since when did it become a fashion magazine’s job to drape the world around us in feel-good messages and exclude any complex topic (or person) that doesn’t conform to typical ideas of model behaviour?” she asks.

“God, how patronizing to female readers! How claustrophobic. Fashion evolves from inappropriate behaviour, from risks, mistakes and craziness, as much as from restraint. No, our concern is what’s happening, which is the fundamental definition of fashion. And in particular, what’s happening in terms of the images that surround us, which Gretzky’s certainly have been, at least for those of you who might have peeked at your partner’s Twitter feed. It’s up to you to decide what you want to rip from that as you experiment with your own style.”

Got it? Me neither.

But what is clear is that the Rogers Media machine is cranked up to 11 in its bid to convince Canadians that it scored what it believes is a big-deal interview with a woman whose only other plans seem to be to focus on her music.

 

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

 

Canadian magazine publishers want taxpayers to help them reinvent themselves, asking the federal government for money to develop digital products they hope will compensate for falling print subscriptions.

The trade association that represents Canadian publishers has been quietly lobbying federal officials in an attempt to win funding to develop multimedia-rich digital editions that go beyond the capabilities of print.

Despite falling circulation at the country’s largest publications and anemic adoption rates for their online versions, Magazines Canada is convinced readers will move online if publishers can train employees how to enhance their products for Web-savvy readers.

That means tablet versions that contain as much video and audio as text, and other digital enhancements that help readers connect with the content in a deeper way than is possible in print.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

The rush to smartphones isn’t paying off for Canada’s biggest wireless company.

Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI.B-T39.020.020.05%)saw declines in virtually every aspect of its business in the past quarter, led by a surprisingly weak performance in its critical wireless business.

Although Rogers continues to add subscribers at a healthy clip as customers flock to iPhones and other sleek devices, they are increasingly becoming budget conscious and opting for lower-cost data plans. That led to a slowdown of its wireless data revenue growth rate.

Read the full story in the Globe and Mail

Tablets and e-readers might be the future of the publishing industry, but the print magazine is far from a write-off.

Canadian publishers lost $50-million in newsstand sales in the last year, but an industry poll into consumer habits hints at a brighter future for publishers brave enough to keep investing in their printed products.

Data from the Periodical Marketers of Canada to be released Wednesday show single-copy sales decreased 7 per cent in 2011, with retail sales of $518-million.

But a poll commissioned by the industry association shows those who do read magazines overwhelmingly prefer to read on paper, despite the ever-widening list of digital alternatives made available by publishers anxious to keep them reading.

Those who do buy digital editions are nearly twice as likely as the average reader to buy additional printed magazines in any given month.

“The so-called doomsday scenario that has print magazines doomed to obscurity is just a myth,” said Ray Argyle, executive director of the Periodical Marketers of Canada. “The trend seems to point toward the purchase of single copies and away from mail subscriptions.”

Read the story at the Globe and Mail

Emboldened by the success of its digital paywall that has seen some 455,000 users pay for online news, The New York Times is tightening access to its website in a move that paves the way for more aggressive pay models at publications across North America.

For the past year, the publisher allowed access to 20 free stories a month from any single computer. It has lowered that number to 10 to encourage more people to pay for the news – although it said readers who were directed to a story via social media or a search engine would have unrestricted access to it.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail
View a slideshow of Canadian online paywall efforts 

The newspaper group’s efforts to have readers pay for online content have been closely watched by publishers around the world since it launched its paywall last year. As it officially announced subscriber numbers for the first time Tuesday, publishers began scrubbing the release for insight into how to enhance their own fledgling paywalls.

The Times’ metered system is rapidly becoming the preferred method of newspaper publishers charging for online content, and is being adopted by a number of Canadian outlets.

Following experiments in Montreal and Victoria, Postmedia Network Canada Corp. will restrict access to several of its metropolitan daily newspapers in the spring. The Globe and Mail is expected to launch a metered version of the business content on its website in the second half of the year, and Torstar Corp. continues to test a metered model at its Hamilton Spectator.

Magazine publishers are also considering how to charge for their content online, with Rogers Media Inc. considering enhanced paid-access models for its consumer magazines such as Maclean’s and Chatelaine.

“We are really all in this together as an industry as we try to figure out what works,” said Wayne Parrish, chief operating officer at Postmedia. “I don’t think anyone has an idea of what will work in two, three or five years.”

Some analysts took the Times’ move as an encouraging signal.

“Today’s positive announcement is the first good news from the company in some time,” said Douglas Arthur, a media analyst at Evercore Partners. “[It] also announced a new restrictive access policy … this would seem to underscore the company’s confidence in the pay wall model.”

The confidence has been infectious, largely because the Times is expected to reap an $85-million haul from its online subscribers in 2012.Gannett Co. Inc., the largest publisher in the United States, recently announced plans to restrict content at 80 of its newspapers (excluding its flagship USA Today).

Other organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have also adopted online pay schemes that include metered systems, as well as subscription-only models.

All of the companies are trying to figure out how to wring money out of readers, regardless of how they access news. Websites are still the most popular method of online access, but smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly popular.

Companies initially believed that selling apps would be a good way to monetize news, but a Nielsen study finds that has had mixed results in the United States, where the top 25 news apps in the country are all free to download and only two require a paid subscription.

Most publishers still depend on selling advertising, however, and a recent study suggested American newspapers are earning $1 in digital advertising revenue for every $7 they lose in their print products. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 38 newspapers in the United States, and cited “cultural inertia” for the papers’ inability to seize new revenue opportunities.

“The shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed,” the report stated, adding the executives they interviewed considered replacing print revenue an “existential” issue.