Editorial
May/June 2003
ª Print this Page ªClose this WindowA quiet protest
By Keith Berg, Managing Editor
ustralian Commonwealth Health regulations allow trade magazines like this one to carry tobacco advertisements, provided that they are distributed only to people who are directly involved in the sale of tobacco products.
But trade magazines directed at tobacco retailers are inevitably distributed to a limited number of companies who are not directly involved with tobacco- advertising clients, ad agencies, industry associations and so on. Strictly speaking, these folk should not be seeing a magazine with tobacco ads in it. However, local trade publishers have otherwise tightly controlled the circulation of tobacco material in the past and health authorities have sensibly turned a blind eye to this anomaly in the regulations.
But one trade publisher, who has been around for long enough to know better, has been caught carrying tobacco advertising while at the same time selling magazine subscriptions to Joe Public. The upshot has been a consumer complaint to the Commonwealth Department of Health. This complaint has had a domino effect and has wrought changes in every trade magazine that carries tobacco advertising, including this one.
Now, for about 1,500 of our 16,400 readers, Australian Convenience Store News is going to look somewhat different. For these 1,500 readers, who are not directly involved in the sale or distribution of tobacco products, all tobacco advertisements in this magazine has been obscured. This is to meet the regulations, as applied after the consumer complaint to the opposition publication.
We could easily have replaced the tobacco ads that go to these 1,500 industry suppliers with filler articles, to make their magazines look a bit smarter. But we prefer our readers in the supply side of the industry to know the extent to which their industry magazine has been censored.
Sure, it looks more than a little strange, but we like to think of it as a quiet protest.
