I’ve been known to joke that a magazine is the most ridiculous business model imaginable. Explaining to someone that a circulator often “pays for subscribers” with a campaign, crosses their fingers and prays for renewals two or three years down the road, is rightfully met with a quizzical look.

Magazines are clearly a game of admirable stupidity driven by rare passion, propped up by nothing more than belief. Even for those of us in circ, the business model is not really the reason we’re pulling late nights to get the book out the door.

But if you can’t get your business going, why should the average Canadian taxpayer be responsible for your personal passion? Your niche interests? Your “little” magazine? Why should say, a literary journal, with less than 500 subscribers, get funding from the Canadian government?

In some ways, I think these questions would be easily answered if the Canadian taxpaying public knew anything about the economics of magazines. Since the new Canada Periodical Fund was announced, a lot of people—in the magazine community and outside of it—have been voicing their varied opinions on its flaws. What’s struck me about the dialogue is that some members of the public equate a good editorial product with its ability to thrive without grants. "If your magazine is good and people like it," they say, "obviously it will do well, no?" (Tell that to Lola, Saturday Night and Domino.)

As Marco pointed out, the comments on the CBC story are very telling: "If the magazines cannot make it on their own, let them go under. Eventually we will have a few less but they will be self supporting.” A few less is a bit of an understatement; currently 1,200 magazines in Canada are supported by the Publications Assistance Program alone. And I think we all have a pretty good idea of what would happen to magazine culture if PAP suddenly disappeared.

If the business model was that good editorial content and a quality product got the bulk of consumer dollars, we probably wouldn’t need to ask the government to float our marketing and circ initiatives, support our editorial content (god forbid we pay writers a decent wage) or give us a break on postal costs. The average reader is so used to getting content for free that there isn’t a natural impulse to pay the price for quality, so we end up practically giving the product away for free and relying on advertising to survive. And the bigger a magazine gets, the more diluted it becomes by the needs of advertising.

Rather than asking why the government should pay for small circ mags to exist, we should ask why the views, ideas, and agendas of the mainstream are the only ones that deserve to thrive? (and by the way, the Canadian government is also paying lots more money to support more mainstream mags, but it seems like it’s easier to pick off the little guys.) If the government didn’t “pay for my hobby,” I’d be forced to read only one idea, paid for by advertising dollars, produced for the masses in the most palatable, bland form imaginable.

The CPF has established a 5,000 annual circ floor, effectively saying that mags smaller that that aren't worth the small amount of money and time they spend on them.

This may seem reasonable, but when you consider what these magazines actually do with this money, how far they stretch it, and that many of these small mags are put out by unpaid volunteers who believe passionately in producing a quality product not supported by advertising dollars (and needs), the cultural benefit of such a small grants is immeasurable. Killing these magazines off by deciding they’re not worth the money or administrative time will carve a huge wound in our national culture.

If the government is truly interested in “investing in magazines,” the proportionally large return on the small mag investment makes it a very good business decision.