Franchising the candy store: split-run magazines and a new international regime for trade in culture.

Ted Madger is the director of communication studies and an associate professor of media ecology at New York University. Prior to that he was the director of the mass communication program at York University. He is the author of Canada's Hollywood: the Canadian State and Feature Films (1993) and numerous articles on Canada's cultural industries and the political economy of communication. E-mail: ted.magder@nyu.edu

I. INTRODUCTION

In early April 1993, baseball enthusiasts across Canada were treated to an unusual sight. Larry Walker, the Montreal Expo's gold-glove, left-fielder graced the cover of U.S.-based Sports Illustrated magazine. While Walker himself may have enough star power to merit a cover shot, this was Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue and the Expos are hardly a popular draw in most U.S. baseball markets. Walker was in one of those familiar baseball poses: right hand grasping the belt above his pinstripe pants, left arm raised to the shoulder, a Rawling's glove slung over the butt end of his Louisville slugger ... hockey stick. As it happens, Walker is Canadian: born in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, about 35 kilometres (or 20 miles) outside of Vancouver. An aspiring goaltender for his hometown hockey team, Walker realized at the age of sixteen that he had no future as a professional hockey player. He turned to baseball and saw his first quality curveball playing

* A list of acronyms used in this article is provided on page 51. for the Utica Blue Sox, an independent baseball team in upstate New York. The Expos signed him for $1,500. The same edition of Sports Illustrated contains a profile of Cito Gaston, the Toronto Blue Jay's manager, and an article on the possibility of an all-Canadian baseball World Series. The issue begins with a lengthy feature on American college basketball and ends with two profiles of European hockey players now playing for Canadian teams in the National Hockey League. One of the profiles bears the easily translatable title "Pas de Probleme."

This was the first of six special issues to be published in 1993 by Time Canada, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Time Warner, the world's largest media conglomerate. These issues would bear the name Sports Illustrated Canada (SI Canada) and would replace the regular, weekly issues of Sports Illustrated that have a circulation in Canada of roughly 150,000. The April 5th issue contained about 30 percent Canadian content and scooped up 40 pages of Canadian advertising worth roughly $250,000. (1) It included full-page placements for Canadian Airlines, Sony Canada, Tourism Quebec, Black Velvet Canadian Whisky, and Volkswagen's new Golf ("In Canada, we briefly considered calling it the Hockey"). Although one of the profiles was written by a Canadian journalist, all of the editorial content was assembled at Time Inc.'s New York office and then transferred electronically via a Crosfield page fax system to a printing plant north of Toronto owned by Quebecor Printing, a Canadian company.

Time Inc., the magazine publishing arm of Time Warner, leads all U.S.-based magazine publishers in terms of both circulation and revenue. In 1996 its top three publications, People, Sports Illustrated and Time, helped Time Inc. earn more than $500 million in operating income on more than $4 billion in revenue. (2) Magazines account for close to 25 percent of Time Warner's total revenue stream; they provide the company with a reliable source of income as it undertakes new acquistions and new media ventures. Indeed, while the magazine industry's share of total advertising in the U.S. has remained fairly constant over the past decade (at roughly 8 percent), Time Inc. is on something of a roll, reporting annual double-digit growth between 1991 and 1997. Some of Time Inc.'s recent success can be attributed to a general increase in advertising expenditures during the 1990s, but Time Inc., like other magazine publishers, has also aggressively pursued new revenue streams. The introduction of new magazines is one of the tactics employed. In 1996, over 900 new magazines were pitched to American readers; that year, Time Inc. published 28 titles, up from 12 a decade before. For publishers of already successful magazines such as Sports Illustrated, other tactics can reap dividends. In 1996, for example, Time Inc. began publication of Sports Illustrated for Kids. A separate edition of Sports Illustrated for Women is in the works. Sports Illustrated Classics, on the other hand, recycles and repackages old editorial material into special annual issues and commoratives. In a partnership with CNN (itself part of the Time Warner stable) since December, 1996, the magazine has operated CNN/SI, a 24 hour sports-news cable channel. Spin-off publications and broadcasting ventures such as these are part of a more general strategy to use established magazines as brand-names for a host of consumer goods and services. `Brand extension' includes everything from clothing ...

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