Publishing

Yes, Glenn worked for a decade as Marketing Director at Western Producer Publications and yes he has created successful launches fora number of publications. But the fun story isn’t about any of that grown up stuff. It’s all about …

The nickel magazine

Glenn Caleval got into the publishing business while attending Albert elementary school in Regina.

Yes. The publishing business. Read through to see how it was a genuine business.

The Teacher Advisor for the established school newspaper had chosen another student to be its editor.

As is not uncommon for boys that age, the chosen editor and Glenn were rivals and Glenn was unwilling to accept the “defeat” and its accompanying taunts.

He put together a team of students to publish a “magazine,” dismissing the term “newspaper” both to get around the school’s claim that it could have only one newspaper, and to preside over a product with higher perceived value.

A “We publish a magazine, you only do a newspaper” kind of boast.

A basic design was built with a cover page and overall layout characteristic of magazines and clearly distinct from the school newspaper. A title was chosen, the “Albert Rival.”

However, the new team needed access to school equipment, particularly typewriters and the Gestetner machine for printing. This required a Teacher Advisor.

Glenn persuaded one particularly encouraging member of faculty yo take the responsibility and the project was a go.

During the first meeting of the magazine staff, as assignments were created and handed out, Glenn announced that this work was valuable and the product the team was creating was novel. It had to have a price.

With some skepticism, the team accepted that the magazine would be sold for five cents per copy.

The first cover story was “Nuclear Energy: the good, the bad and the ugly” and three different team members were assigned to cover each of the three angles. A highly talented artist was tasked with creating a political cartoon as a feature themed on the cover story.

The team of kids was remarkable. They approached their assignments with more enthusiasm and effort than any essay or drawing assignment given out by teachers. Part of the enthusiasm was provided by the competitive context in which they were being led.

The Albert Rival was to be the best school publication in the city. It was to be serious, about “real” issues and funny. They were going to make something that people wanted and for which people would be willing to pay!

A small run of the first issue was printed for demonstration purposes. Glenn took these and visited retailers and others in the neighbourhood to solicit retail sales locations.

Within a couple of days the Albert Rival was available for retail purchase at a drug store, two restaurants, the local library and a corner confectionery.

Success was in hand. Nickels were rolling in. Glenn Caleval was publisher of a real product actually selling in the market!

Sadly, the business was short-lived.

Grade-school whining made its way to the Principal: it was unfair for the Albert Rival to not only be getting nickels from kids in the school, but be out in the community where the school newspaper couldn’t compete.

The principal called in Glenn and tried to have a “heart-to-heart.”

He pointed at the name of the magazine and suggested “Rival” could damage school morale.

Glenn protested that the Rival was to denote the magazine’s mission to provide rival viewpoints and information to the regular fluff available, not to rival the school newspaper. Besides, Glenn protested, the biggest audience wasn’t even school kids.

Glenn pointed to the the enthusiasm and hard work of his team, and the support of the student population as proof of the magazine lifting morale. He refused to agree to resign and the meeting ended.

A day after the meeting, Glenn was notified by his Teach Advisor that he, the teacher, had been instructed to withdraw his sponsorship of the project and that without a Teacher Advisor the Rival would no longer be allowed to work on school property or use school equipment.

The business was dead.

But the teacher drove home important themes for Glenn.

He told him frankly that it would not have been his choice to shut down the magazine. He said his kids had learned things that no one was teaching at the elementary level and learning them “organically” on their own.

He explained the meaning of “differentiation” and pointed to the fact that Glenn had naturally gravitated to effecting that principal of marketing. He told Glenn to be proud of putting together a “retail distribution network” in shorter time than most professionals.

So while Glenn Caleval’s first business published a single issue, it resulted in his first education in business and marketing, with the teacher arming him with a new vocabulary describing things Glenn was already thinking and doing. Terms like “value proposition” and “customer needs” were firmly entrenched. The word “differentiation” became a linguistic talisman.

There would be no turning back from the experience and information gained. It was now certain that Glenn Caleval would be involved in business thinking and practice for the rest of his life.

*The names of the other individuals are not provided as their publication should be with the direct consent of the people affected.