You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
DATELINE: WINNIPEG, CANADA
After 90 years, The Beaver is changing it’s name. No not that beaver! The kind you can read while sitting on the toilet.
Huh?
THE BEAVER! is a respected magazine that began when the Pacific Frontier was about expeditions and trapping and trading animal pelts. But the clean as a whistle, history oriented publication has unfortunately become a destination for internet scumbags and nair-de-wells.
What’s the problem you ask? When you Google The Beaver, guess what comes up in your web browser?
It’s brown and hairy, but it ain’t exactly building dams or promoting reader of the month.
Publishers say the periodical’s harmless appelation, THE BEAVER, is clogging mail-in boxes like a hot tub filter at a YMCA in San Francisco.
After 90 years of delivering clean and boring articles on topics ranging from Canadian Backpacking to gutting fish, The Beaver has come to a cross-roads in its publication life.
It appears that the magazine has not evolved as quickly as the world’s need for smut and instantaneous pornography, and that has caused chaos at The Beaver. Imagine that; chaos and Beaver in the same sentence! Who’d have thunk it?
In today’s cut throat publishing times, every magazine needs the internet to survive, and The Beaver is no different.
When Time magazine tries to get you to subscribe, their message lands in your in-box and that’s the end of it. When Rolling Stone wants me to check out a story, editors fire the idea into my in-box and await my attention. But when The Beaver sends you an email, bells and whistles in your spam filters go brezerk and send The Beaver’s innoccuous ad to cyber prison inside your computer. Gate-keepers like AVG and McAfee and Norton are the jailers who incarcerate the communication as a potential threat.
What magazine wants to be classified as a potential threat, or a virus, or a time bomb ticking worm? It’s an advertising death sentence.
According to published reports, the magazine is being relaunched under a new name. So long Beaver, Hello Canada’s History!
Let’s see your spam filter mistake Canada’s History as pornography.
Deborah Morrison, president of Canada’s National History Society and the longtime publisher of The Beaver, told Canwest News Service that the unfortunate double-entendre has posed serious difficulties for several years as the magazine attempted to attract new, younger, web-based customers to bolster its loyal but aging base of about 50,000 print subscribers.
“To be perfectly blunt about it, ‘The Beaver’ was an impediment on the Internet,” she said. “People were literally writing us and saying, ‘We can’t get your e-newsletter because it’s being spam-filtered out, can you change the title of the heading?’ “
So for you internet folks out there; now when you Google BEAVER, expect the furry, hairy kind, either with legs or without. But don’t expect a magazine rich in Canadian history, which was originally named for the fur trade that was so prevalent in the day.
Whether you are Canadian or not, I strongly recommend The Beaver, no matter what it calls itself in the future.
And that is crazy!