Over the weekend, I traveled to the City & Regional Magazine Association Publisher’s Roundtable in Cancun, Mexico. Evansville Living has been a member of CRMA since our inception, and publisher’s roundtable meetings have taken me or my husband Todd to many destinations, most often held in the city of a member magazine: Miami, Chicago, White Plains, N.Y., Palm Springs, Calif., Palm Beach, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn., are a few of the nice locales we’ve visited for the meeting. Though there was no host magazine in Cancun, the 25 publishers who attended made the most a sliver of time between deadlines at a location that proved to be extremely accommodating and even economical.
Todd is on the board of directors for CRMA. At the roundtable, limited to publishers (unlike the conference where employees of member magazines are encouraged to attend), Todd typically attends the meetings and I join in for the group social and networking opportunities. (I more fully participate in the conferences, where editorial and art tracks are held.) Through the years, we’ve made great friendships with these resilient publishers. We share information liberally (we generally don’t compete with one another), discussing best practices, printing contracts, circulation fulfillment, and revenue streams.
We have a lot of fun. Paul Byrne, publisher of Okanagan Life, based in Kelowna, British Columbia, never shows up without his guitar. At our farewell party, a wonderful Mexican buffet with a mariachi band, Paul played and sang songs he composed for his play, “Ink! The Musical,” which debuted in his market in 2006 and tells Byrne’s not-too-far-from-true accounts of Memphis and other CRMA magazines. Plans, I’m told, are forming for a CRMA band at the conference in Atlanta this spring. My husband’s drums fit in our car top carrier. Music and magazines unite publishers across North America.
