The first thing I want to do is say thank you to the 380 ministers who completed our online survey and the 30 people who wrote me in response to the April editorial with suggestions on how we could improve the Record.
Taken together, the feedback was both good and … well, let’s put it this way: we’ve either tried or considered all the business suggestions people made.
In the main, however, it was gratifying to receive so many positive comments. Shirley Huckins summed it up, saying: “The Record is an excellent magazine. I read it from cover to cover and find the articles informative and interesting. I would say just keep on doing what you are doing—which is a great job!”
And those who expressed displeasure—mostly in the online survey—were mostly expressing their unhappiness with the denomination and with the fact that the Record isn’t an official denominational publication and so doesn’t express an “official” line.
As far as I know, even though the Record was owned by the church for most of its existence, it was never the official voice of the denomination. It always had editorial independence to some degree.
Which leads to another interesting observation. Several ministers commented in the online survey that they would never subscribe unless it reflected true Reformed theology. Others opined that the church needed to do that first. Of course, an almost equal number of ministers thought the Record “too conservative.”
Which leads naturally to the conclusion of the majority that, although they might not agree with every article in the publication, they felt we were trying to be fair and strike a balance in our reporting.
These readers didn’t have any suggestions as to what to change. They are aware of the decline in publishing and the sliding numbers of the denomination. (For the past quarter century, the Presbyterian Church in Canada has been losing about 2,800 members a year; the Record about 2,000, mostly through the Every Home Plan. As reported in the May issue, the Record may not be solvent next year.)
Quite a number of people proposed switching entirely to digital editions of the magazine. (And quite a number were also unaware of our digital presence! We have been publishing a full digital edition of the magazine for several years. We also have a Facebook page as well as a Facebook community page. All that is in addition to our standard website that has many extras that won’t fit in the magazine.)
But printing and mailing the magazine actually costs little, because we receive the standard federal magazine grant, which covers about 80 per cent of that cost.
So, thank you for all your suggestions. And thank you for supporting our work in so many ways. It’s good to know that we are generally on the right track.
It’s just a matter of money, now.
