Käthe Lemon

Are your contributors/staff paid
Yes

Summary of the candidate’s lifetime career in magazine publishing to date
Käthe Lemon was the editor-in-chief of Avenue magazine for more than 15 years. Under her direction, Avenue was the recipient of multiple industry awards, including being named the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association’s Magazine of the Year in 2020. She served on the board of AMPA for many years and, in 2024, was named president of the International Regional Magazine Association.

In 2020, Käthe was named VP of Product Development and Publishing. Throughout the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, she was instrumental in maintaining RedPoint’s operations and wore multiple hats. Käthe acted as publisher and editor and continued to oversee the production of 12 issues of Avenue magazine, working with one editor and an art director. She managed the sales team, connected with clients on behalf of Avenue, and oversaw the custom publications department, helping maintain client contracts and even forge new ones. In early 2021, Käthe was officially named president of RedPoint.

In early 2023, Käthe doubled down on her commitment to the magazine industry and RedPoint as a company and, together with her business partner, Roger Jewett, purchased RedPoint and became a co-owner. Shortly after, Käthe and Roger purchased The Scene, seeing potential in connecting with a new audience and celebrating Calgary’s arts, culture and going out scene.

In her new role, Käthe has revitalized RedPoint’s mission, transforming it from a legacy media company to a social venture focused on connection. She has championed diversity, equity and inclusion practices within RedPoint and the larger publishing industry, created new revenue streams, such as the A-List Membership program, and forged new partnerships, including launching Top 20 Under 20 with the YMCA.
Key highlights of the candidate’s career
As Avenue’s editor-in-chief, Käthe played a pivotal role in expanding and growing the Avenue brand, creating new partnerships and brand extensions, including Made in Alberta, Future of the City Festival and Innovators of the Year. What is particularly remarkable about Käthe was her willingness to pivot from her role as editor in the dark days of COVID and step into the role of president and co-owner. Käthe has always had a hand in the day-to-day editorial processes at RedPoint. But now, along with proofing and mentoring new writers, she is actively growing the business. She is leading RedPoint’s new mission to connect communities through trusted storytelling.
Her work transforming a legacy media company into a social enterprise focused on connection was a monumental task. It was more than a course correction but a company-wide system overhaul. Under Kathe’s direction, RedPoint examined its mission statement, value proposition and all current work. Today, all of RedPoint’s brands are aligned:

As RedPoint’s flagship brand, Avenue magazine enhances the profile of Calgary and celebrates the city as an amazing place to live and visit in every issue.

The Scene creates opportunities to share the stories of Calgary’s grassroots arts, culture and music scene, and its smaller distribution makes it a more affordable option for local businesses to advertise within.

Through our Content Studio, we work to find and encourage partnerships with like-minded organizations to create new custom publications and digital content that further our mutual goals of connecting with Calgarians.

Under Käthe’s leadership, RedPoint’s vision is crystal clear. Our social responsibility is not an add-on to our work—our work is, in and of itself, a social benefit that creates a more resilient city by connecting Calgarians across communities, interests, and industries and fosters a sense of belonging. In practice, this also means we’ve committed to using a wider range of sources in stories to increase opportunities for underrepresented voices and to make them known to a wider audience, creating new points of connection.

This emphasis on social responsibility has been a major element of our growth over the past few years. It is the differentiator in our business model, attracting new partnerships and clients and gaining us international attention.

In May 2024, Käthe was invited by FIPP (the International Federation of Periodical Publishers) to present at its annual congress in Portugal on RedPoint’s focus on community connection and new business model.

Our mission, to create connected communities for all, means we purposefully seek out value-aligned organizations as clients and partners. Recent examples of purposeful partnerships we’ve created in 2024 include the Centre for Sexuality, Village Brewery, YMCA Calgary and Calgary Health Foundation.

The partnership with the Centre for Sexuality presented an opportunity for RedPoint to support editorial and design content related to the Centre’s community advocacy work, which promotes healthy sexuality and advocates for 2SLGBTQ Calgarians. Creating space to tell the stories of underrepresented communities aligns with RedPoint’s commitment to DEI. Our other partnerships have provided similar opportunities to connect Calgarians and further our mission.

In the past five years, Käthe has launched:
– Top 20 Under 20 Awards
– Future of the City Festival
– The Innovation Issue
– A chef- and industry-focused Best Restaurants Event
– The annual Best Things to Eat Market
– Avenue’s A-LIST Membership program

Together with RedPoint’s co-owner Roger Jewett, Käthe purchased and reimagined The Scene, including its editorial mandates and community connections. This resulted in the magazine’s highest-ever sales.

Käthe loves Calgary. She believes the heart and soul of our city are the vibrant and diverse people who live here and the connections they forge between themselves. A resilient city fosters and maintains strong connections between people across many communities—not only geographic communities but cultural communities, work communities, communities of common interests, and more. RedPoint Media Group exists to strengthen those connections by sharing stories and increasing engagement. It does this implicitly by profiling the people, organizations, events, and communities of the city and explicitly by encouraging readers to get involved in organizations, attend events, and buy local. Supporting local businesses feels imperative, especially right now.

We believe connection is a fundamental human need and is at the root of many of society’s current troubles. By reconceiving our work to focus on connection rather than informing while not losing our commitment to fact-checking, we believe we can make a greater impact and transform the landscape of local media.
Instead of focusing on traffic and the number of people who see a story, we are focusing on the length of time and level of engagement we have with each person in our audience. This approach resonates with our readers and clients. In our most recent reader survey, 97.7 percent of Avenue readers reported that they agree or strongly agree that Avenue is a trusted source of information. This is an astounding number at a time when there is broad distrust of the media.

Describe the candidate’s contributions to the Alberta magazine publishing industry, and how they have made a difference and helped improve the industry as a whole.
Käthe is a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion. RedPoint was instrumental in bringing DEI training for journalists to AMPA. Inclusion FACTOR provided this training, which was a significant step in improving our understanding and approach to DEI initiatives in the workplace and in magazine creation.

RedPoint’s staff was active in creating AMPA’s Indigenous Internship program and has hired through it to expand opportunities for Indigenous youth and expose us to Indigenous ways of knowing.

RedPoint also partnered with Afros in tha City (AITC) to support the growth of Black storytelling in Calgary. Avenue has published three pieces in collaboration with AITC and also hired an intern in collaboration with AITC.

We have committed to continue to explore learning about DEI with our staff and to examine our practices as well as our outcomes.

To the best of our knowledge, Avenue’s DEI source tracking initiative is the first of its kind in the publishing industry in Alberta. Since 2021, the Avenue team has been tracking and assessing the diversity of all sources included in the print magazine and on the website. The editorial team regularly reviews the tracking results to evaluate progress, but we have also found that over time, this has become proactive. Editors ask writers about the diversity of sources during the assigning process and encourage them to find a wider range of sources.

This process has allowed Avenue to assess and examine the sources the team has been using in stories and create more opportunities to engage a more diverse community whose voices are included in the publication. This tracking initiative has created richer and more diverse storytelling and allowed for new connections with and engagement from underrepresented communities in Calgary. As a city magazine, the diversity tracking initiative has broadened the scope of the stories Avenue tells and has invited us to use sources from a larger and more diverse audience of the people who call Calgary home. We have applied for two grants to try to make this system automated and to create a product that we can share with others in the industry in order to broaden the impact of the diversity tracking concept.

Under Käthe’s direction, RedPoint’s new membership program is a model for new revenue opportunities in the publishing industry. The A-List Membership program was launched in 2024 and offers access to curated events through our local business partners. The A-List program creates a new reader revenue stream and provides an easy and attractive way for our most dedicated readers to support the brand while experiencing the best of life in the city that Avenue has always been associated with. At the same time, the A-List program supports the publication with new advertising partnerships that help to bolster our page counts in a very cost-effective way while also providing added value in promoting the partner directly through the A-List event. In the past year, we’ve brought on more than two dozen business partners and have grown the membership to almost 150 people.

RedPoint is also committed to sustainability. In 2022, Käthe spearheaded a partnership with TreeEra, a local organization that provides businesses with simple, affordable ways to plant trees to help in the fight against climate change. Approximately 15.4 trees can offset the printing of one ton of coated magazine paper (about 200,000 sheets). For Avenue’s 2023 carbon usage, TreeEra planted 2,497 mangrove trees, and in 2024, Avenue’s number increased to 2,586 trees. These trees are equivalent to roughly 14,116,883 sheets of coated magazine paper and can offset approximately 589,967 pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050.

For each Avenue issue published, TreeEra plants mangrove trees, an endangered species that stores carbon dioxide and supports animal and plant life near oceans and rivers. By partnering with TreeERA to maximize our carbon footprint, we are creating a positive impact at every stage of our production process.

From engaging local sources and using carbon-neutral printers where possible to targeted distribution and planting new trees to replace every tree used in the production of Avenue magazine, we’re a clear example of how environmental sustainability can be an essential component of any business plan.

Under Käthe’s leadership, RedPoint’s new mission and work have been recognized. At the Calgary Chamber of Commerce Small Business Awards, RedPoint won the TD Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Award and was shortlisted for the Air Canada Community Champion Award in 2024.

In 2024, Käthe was the recipient of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce Sherrold Moore Award, bestowed to a long-standing member whose character embodies the true essence of community, volunteerism and humble dedication.

Finally, Käthe is a vocal advocate for supporting local, which includes Alberta’s local media organizations. She speaks regularly on panels, at workshops and presents at industry events and conferences, sharing RedPoint’s belief that quality storytelling across the breadth of our communities and especially storytelling that encourages readers to get involved, attend an event or shop local helps build belonging. When local businesses support other local businesses, Calgarians and the larger community benefit. Championing local and sharing the stories of Calgary’s communities creates a more vibrant, diverse, invested and inclusive place to live, which is our ultimate goal.

What is the frequency of the publication?
6 times a year

What is the per issue circulation?
45,000

Give a brief outline of the nominee’s duties at the magazine
Käthe edits, assigns, proofs, writes and consults on distribution for all of RedPoint’s publications. As a manager, she mentors six direct reports and leads the senior leadership team. She also leads the sales team, consults on client-facing projects, builds and manages budgets and forges new relationships.
She is the face of RedPoint and regularly presents at events, speaks at webinars and conferences and appears in the media. She leads RedPoint in the pursuit of new ideas, such as premium content and sponsorship program development.