CBC radio interviews Masthead editor

On Nov. 3, Andy Barrie, host of CBC’s southern Ontario morning radio program Metro Morning, spoke with Marco Ursi, editor of Masthead magazine, about the effect the economic downturn is having on newspaper and magazine publishing.

Magazine consultant D.B. Scott was disappointed by the way the interview was framed. He wrote on his Canadian Magazines blog:

“Ursi did a good job of answering questions carefully and thoroughly,
but by the time he did so, the introduction had so thoroughly muddled
up the state of daily newspapers and large U.S. titles with the
situation for Canadian magazines that most listeners would have written
us off. (To add insult, the CBC managed to spell his Ursi’s name wrong
on its website.)

For radio people, I guess, it’s all print and
gloom makes for a better story. Nuance and qualifiers need not apply.
No distinction is made between the Canadian and U.S. market. This is
not the first time, nor will it likely be the last, that a radio host
and his/her producers paint such a skewed and bleak picture.”

Scott goes on to list not-so-gloomy facts and figures about the magazine industry, including:

• that average issue circulation has grown since 2002 from 61 million to 73 million
• that Print Measurement Bureau data about readership has been steadily growing

Masthead recently announced it is shutting down and its November/December issue is its last.