It was a fixture in more than 30,000 doctors and dentists offices across the country, and had distribution agreements in place with both Sobey’s and Lawtons Drugs stores, yet the prognosis for Canadian Health magazine remained grim.
Produced by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) since 2006, the quarterly publication finally ceased publication with its April issue. The official cause of death, said the publication’s Toronto-based director of sales Blair Graham, was the combination of high print costs and declining advertising revenues.
Canadian Health and its French-language counterpart Santé Canadienne had more than 2.2 million readers per issue and respective readers-per-copy numbers of 16.8 and 16.3 according to the Print Measurement Bureau’s (PMB) spring study. However, the CMA wasn’t able to translate them into a sustainable business, said Graham.
“We didn’t get the [advertiser] auditions that would be expected from such great PMB numbers,” said Graham. “We were losing nickels, but it was just enough to be a distraction to our main business – which is serving the needs of doctors.”
While Canadian Health did produce a digital replica edition that was sent to approximately 3,000 print subscribers and also made available at Canadian-Health.ca, Graham said it didn’t have the budget to develop a comprehensive digital strategy – which ultimately contributed to the publication’s demise.
“I think we knew what we were doing: we built great distribution [and] created a large audience, but we weren’t as digitally savvy as we could have and should have been,” he said.
“The bottom line is we were simply about serving the needs of doctors, which is different from Chatelaine and Canadian Living. We wanted the doctors to see us trying to provide smart, credible, trustworthy information to their patients.”
Graham said that Canadian Health was a top-10 publication among women 35+, but bemoaned the fact that print advertisers are no longer buying “10 deep.” “[They’ll buy] one, two and three, but Best Health would probably get thrown into a package buy,” he said.
Conceived by Graham and fellow publishing veteran Steve Ball as the CMA’s first consumer-facing product (the group also publishes the 102-year-old physician focused Canadian Medical Association Journal), Canadian Health began publishing as a bi-monthly in 2006 before moving to a quarterly publication schedule the next year.
There are no future plans to adopt a web-only format for the publication, said Graham. “It’s not viable or not interesting,” he said. “The content is magnificent: non-biased and perfectly credible, but we’re not going to spend time pursuing it.”
Canadian Health had two direct competitors in the consumer health category: Canadian Health & Lifestyle (which was acquired by Rogers Publishing last year) and the Reader’s Digest title Best Health, which boasted 2.4 million and 897,000 readers respectively according to PMB.
Graham said that the competition wasn’t detrimental to Canadian Health. “They just had deeper pockets and more interest in keeping it going,” he said.
A 25-year veteran of the publishing industry whose career has included stints with Rogers, St. Joseph Media and the independent publisher Family Communications, Graham sounded a cautionary note about the future of the print industry.
“There’s just not that much money in paid subscriptions, so I don’t know how we’re going to do it without advertising,” he said. “All the answers will come, but hopefully after I retire.”
