When Steve and I were going through the early stages of running GayCalgary.com Magazine, the notion of making it all the way to our 100th edition was daunting to say the least.  As a monthly magazine, 100 editions equates to 8 years and 4 months of publishing.  So still being around today to reach this milestone is no small achievement.

We can’t say the time went by unnoticed; the years of doing this have definitely worn on us in different ways.  A milestone of this magnitude made us seriously think, do we want to keep going with GayCalgary?  We gave it hard thought, and even in light of some of the rotten situations we have been faced with, we decided that yes we want to continue.

The other necessary question we considered was whether we have the energy to keep going exactly like we have been, for another 100 issues?  For us, the answer was definitely no.  So we had some conflicts to reconcile.  We needed to consider making changes, in some cases sacrifices, to keep things sustainable for us.

In last month’s column I talked about some of the drawbacks of being so committed to your work, and hinted that we would be announcing changes to our business strategy in this edition – changes that will allow us to move forward without breaking our own backs.

One major alteration that is evident from the cover of this edition is that we have returned to our original name - well nearly, since we have left out the redundant "dot com" that was originally part of our logo.  We will be moving forward with this slightly refreshed logo that reads "GayCalgary Magazine", dropping the awkward "and Edmonton" subtext.  GayCalgary Magazine is what most people have been calling us throughout our whole existence anyway.

I know there are some Edmontonians out there right now giving a cheer because they felt a little insulted that our logo made Edmonton seem secondary to Calgary; though our options were restricted, we can understand that sentiment.

We want GayCalgary Magazine to be flexible in its ability to cover LGBT topics across Alberta, and not appear limited to just Calgary and Edmonton.  But to give other cities equal representation in the title of our magazine as we did with Edmonton would be even more awkward.  Rather than naming ourselves something ridiculous like "GayCalgary and Edmonton and Lethbridge and Red Deer and Banff and Grande Prairie Magazine", or changing our branding completely to something else, we decided to return to our company name and trademark in its simplest form (GayCalgary™) tagging on only the product suffix (Magazine).

We are GayCalgary Magazine and www.GayCalgary.com because we operate out of Calgary, and Calgary is our primary market.  Our slogan is still "The Voice of Alberta’s LGBT Community" because our scope of coverage and our target audience are still across Alberta.  Edmonton is included in that scope along with many other Alberta cities, but is no longer explicitly mentioned in the name of our product.

For over 5 years, we have been going to great lengths to treat Edmonton as a pillar city of our publication – trying to interface with them seamlessly, as if we were operated as much out of Edmonton as we are out of Calgary.  Keeping this up was often exhausting if not impractical, especially as event coverage was concerned.

So we won’t lie.  Moving forward, Edmonton is going to see a slight reduction in what we do for the LGBT community in their city.  Realistically we can’t make ourselves as available for Edmonton events as we are for Calgary’s, simply for the 6 hour round trip drive.  Reducing our commitment to Edmonton and bringing it in line with our commitment to other Alberta cities is one change we are making to work smarter rather than harder.

Edmontonians will be seeing less of us personally because we will be making trips a lot less frequently to their city.  We’ll only be coming out to cover a few major annual community events and any others that we have a personal interest in attending.

Otherwise we will be relying on the initiative of event organizers and other individuals to notify us about upcoming events and submit photographs for us to consider for publication.  So in most cases, as with other cities, the amount of Edmonton content that we publish will be directly proportional to the amount of input we receive from Edmontonians.

In the past we have relied on local photographers to help us out, in some cases regularly volunteering their time like Jeff Park, Brian Baker, and Karen Hofmann; and in other cases asking us to pay for their professional services like Jackson Photografix.  We continue to be willing to pay Edmonton-based photographers and writers to provide Edmonton coverage, and we’re still looking for people to step forward.

Just a note on photo taking: to be considerate of individual privacy concerns we ask that anyone taking photos with the intent of submitting them to us, ensure that they inform everyone in their photographs of this intention, and respect any requests for their photos not to be used.

Furthermore, our sponsorship of Edmonton events will likely be a bit more selective.  While endeavoring to support all non-profit groups in Edmonton is a noble idea, realistically there are too many for us to manage all at once.  We need to concentrate on building stronger relations with groups that bring the most mutual benefit and exposure, and leave it up to Edmonton businesses and individuals to get behind the causes that they feel provide critical community support for their city (assuming the two sets are even different).

Finally, we made an executive decision to reduce the Edmonton map in the Directory and Events area.  With the changes that have occurred in the Edmonton community since we first started publishing this map, today the majority of the space it occupies is unused.

We have been experiencing a general trend that our online downloads of the magazine are increasing while our pickups of print copies are proportionally decreasing.  As the first Canadian LGBT publication to offer full iPad support through our ISSUU flipbook reader, we expect to see this trend continue.

There is no sense in printing copies in excess of the demand for this format, and for that reason we have decreased our guaranteed monthly print quantities to 7,000 from 8,500.  Further, this reduction saves us a fair bit of money at the printers, enabling us to keep our prices affordable for print advertisers.

Being at the leading edge sometimes means we have to cut our own paths through the jungle, so I feel it necessary to make a brief but important comment about the condition of the publishing industry today:

Much like how the Titanic made a grave error judging the size of an iceberg only by what was visible above water, there are many consumers and agencies out there today who continue to judge the value of advertising in a publication purely on the number of print copies they circulate.

This is a problem when it comes to the direction that the publishing industry is heading.  While having a print edition rightly brings business clout, online circulation needs to be taken into consideration and given proper value too.  Until this happens, advertisers will continue to be lead on board with sinking ships – media that are going extinct because they fail (or refuse) to innovate.

We’ve witnessed it ourselves when submitting our magazine details to large and respected media registries that don’t allow us to factor in our online readership, even though these statistics are just as provable and perhaps more accurate indicators of readership than the print statistics that they require.  This is just not acceptable in today’s world.

That off my chest, you’ll also notice some minor rearrangements of our regular features.  Most noticeably, the Find Out section has been shifted closer to the back of the magazine to be adjacent to the Classified ads and cartoons.

This is one way that we are returning to our roots.  GayCalgary started out solely as a website, and as we have been concentrating on maintaining the print branch of our business we haven’t been able to make much progress with our web side of things.

We are changing that by making our website and online edition of our magazine the primary focus again, with the print magazine being supplementary to it.  Our website provides valuable services for LGBT businesses and community groups across Alberta, many of them complimentary.  We want to continue improving the accessibility of what we currently offer, while developing useful new interactive features.  By doing this, we drive more traffic to our website and more readers to our publication, benefiting the advertisers that sustain us.

Advertisers will need to seriously consider including web advertising as part of their budget with us, if they are not already doing so.  We currently receive an average of 5,000 visitors to our website on a daily basis, and existing banner advertisers have seen statistics for exposure and interest that exceed expectations.  As our improvements to the website stimulate further growth, this will only get better.

Rather than taking you down memory lane by republishing old articles in this edition, we will continue our practice of what we call "Retro Tweeting" with renewed vigor.  Our website has an archive of every edition since Issue #1 available for download, so we use Twitter and Facebook to send out links to old articles that range from fun to mind-blowing when read today.

Visit http://www.gaycalgary.com/twitter to be directed to our Twitter page, or http://www.gaycalgary.com/facebookfan to be directed to our Facebook fan page, and sign up to also receive updates about the latest magazine, articles, news releases, prize draws, and more.

This month we were able to get an interview with perhaps the ultimate gay music icon, and no doubt you have already recognized her on our cover: Madonna.  Only a few years ago the thought of interviewing such a big name seemed impossible, but by some stroke of luck and some great timing, she is gracing our 100th cover.  It’s surreal!

There are a number of major community events coming up this month that you should be aware of:

• The Calgary Eagle is holding their 10th Anniversary party on Saturday, February 18th.  The Calgary Eagle has been an instrumental business partner for us, and indeed a pillar of Calgary’s LGBT community.  We will be joining them to celebrate, and we hope you will too.

• February 10th to 12th are packed with things to do as part of Jasper Pride Weekend.  Even if you don’t ski or snowboard, if you’re able to make the trip you’re bound to have an excellent time.

• Team Edmonton is hosting their Annual Mixer on Saturday, February 25th.  If you’re in to playing sports, this is a great opportunity to network with other likeminded folks.  If you’re not into sports, it’s still a fun night with some great people.  See their ad in this edition for more details.

• AIDS Calgary is hosting a special Mardi Gras themed event on Saturday, February 25th: Le Carnaval Rouge.  See their ad in this edition for more details.

As founders and owners of GayCalgary Magazine, it’s impossible to point to a product like ours and say, "I did this".  Without the help of writers and contributors, we would have nothing to fill our pages.  Without the help of individuals in the community, we and our writers and contributors would still have nothing to fill our pages.

We’d like to personally thank Jason Clevett and Stephen Lock who have been writing for us virtually from the beginning.  In addition we’d like to thank numerous others who have shown a strong commitment over the course of years and are still writing or contributing today:  Mercedes Allen, Evan Kayne, Dallas Barnes, Janine Eva Trotta, Carey Rutherford, Chris Azzopardi, Dave Brousseau (A Couple of Guys), Joan Hilty (Bitter Girl), Andrew Collins (Travel), Jack Fertig (Astrology), Glen Hansen and Allen Neuwirth (Chelsea Boys), Romeo SanVicente (Deep Inside Hollywood), Ed Sikov (Cocktail Chatter), Richard Labonte (Bookmarks) and Dan Woog (Sports).  I’d like to thank the multitude of others not mentioned here for their contributions over the years, and I’d like to remember Nico Hofferd, a contributor who tragically passed away in July of 2007.

GayCalgary Magazine is literally the outcome of thousands and thousands of people.  Even if all you did was pose for a photo that made it into print, you still helped us fill our pages and made a positive impact on us.  Even if all you did was take one of our magazines from a newsstand or download it from our website, you made a positive impact on us.  We are grateful.

In turn, we hope that something we have done or something that you have experienced through us has somehow made a positive impact on you as well.