Times are tough for cultural magazines in Quebec. How do you solve the challenges when teams are tiny and funding is tiny? Le Devoir asked four publications to describe their reality, on the ground, and the conditions they can offer their employees.
LURELU
The most recent issue of this magazine devoted to children’s literature has 68 pages, due to the cuts. “We have published issues of more than 100 pages,” recalls its editor-in-chief, Daniel Sernine. “It is now impossible to produce files of 8 to 10 pages.”
Readers of Lurelua journal founded in 1978, are active in the fields of education and libraries related to reading among young people. They are often the ones who determine which books are the most relevant to bring into schools and classrooms.
“The annual budget of Lurelu is $170,000. The CALQ multi-year grant had been frozen at $60,000 since 2008. In constant dollars, it was worth only $43,000. We were thrown a lifeline of $51,000 by being told that we were losing the multi-year funding.” No way to see it coming, then, and the next money will be given “per project”, whereas the idea of a journal is continuity.
“The salaried staff is one and a half people. We’ve reduced our hours rather than reducing our sky-high $21 and $23 hourly rates. For freelancers and columnists, page rates have been reduced to 2021 levels: $120 per magazine page. The warehouse handlers at our distributor, Dimedia, are paid more than I am as a magazine editor. In the last quarter of 2024, I’ll be paying myself 18 hours a week, when I’m working triple that.”
What Lurelu does it need? “Free storage for our collection of tens of thousands of children’s books, for which we are now paying rent that is beyond our means: 16% of our annual budget. And to return to the pre-cut-off level of funding with which we expected to be able to operate after having absorbed our deficit.” The survival of the magazine is at stake.
SPACE
Published since 1987, Space is a 132-page reference magazine on contemporary art that comes out three times a year. It has 250 subscribers. The magazine is run by a team of four people, who feed on a “starving payroll.” It is difficult to retain employees and collaborators, and to create continuity, because “we can’t increase their fees,” says the assistant editor, Gina Cortopassi.
“The subsidies do not follow not at all inflation. We want to pay a fair price for this work that is essential to us, but we cannot.” The only thing left to do is to “reduce the number of pages, publish less on the website, spend a significant number of hours developing independent income by putting aside the representation, development and production of editorial content.”
“In the long run, therefore, this means less distribution. And less distribution and fewer events means fewer subsidies. This is the vertigo and this impasse that the cuts in culture currently confront us with.”
“We would need at least the amounts from the previous year to be renewed.”
FREEDOM
Founded in 1959, the magazine Freedom talks, four times a year, about art and politics. “I am aware of our ‘luck’ in the context, yes,” replies Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher, editor-in-chief of Freedom.
“We put everything into this request and we didn’t get the amount we asked for. What we received is equivalent to a kind of indexation and doesn’t allow us to consider developments. It will take a lot of imagination to find ways to improve our management practices and better remunerate artists—which is what we are asked to do, of course, as an organization. I have the impression that the entire sector is weakened and that the market is not doing well, despite what some people say. For me, all magazines, all writers need to be better supported at this time.”
“Magazines are in a strange space, with one foot in the market and the other in creation. From here, we see artists faltering and we cannot support them as we should. We collaborate with people who often do voluntary work for the love of art and knowledge, and to make the world more livable, and these people can no longer pay for groceries. It is worrying for thought, for creation, for freedom of expression, for our society in general.”
SPIRAL
Born in 1979, the magazine Spiralone of the best-funded in SODEP, covers current events in the arts, literature and humanities. It received an 18% increase from the Mission Support program, which allows it to consolidate the organization and “to perpetuate current operations in the short and medium term, but with very little room for maneuver,” reports Katrie Chagnon, director.
This financial stability comes from recent changes, including a reduction in the number of issues published annually, which went from four to three, and the reorientation of the Web platform.
“These decisions were imposed in response to the underpayment of employees, whose fees, having become “indecent” over time, absolutely had to be revised upwards – even if they are still not satisfactory,” explains M.me Chagnon.
“Although we can continue to operate normally, our subsidies remain largely insufficient to ensure the development that we imagine for the journal in the short and medium term, in particular to set up new projects and improve the working conditions of the team, whose salaries stagnate below the average threshold despite an enormous load of responsibility and a very high level of education.”