Topic: Media
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts, Masthead is endeavoring to select the 20 most influential Canadian magazines of all time… and rank them. And they’d like to include, if possible, trade or b-to-b titles. They’ve invited me onto the selection panel in part to help with that. And I’ve been using this blog to kind of think out loud about it.
Masthead editor Marco Ursi has suggested on the discussion board that Marketing magazine, among others, ought to be considered for the 20 most influential magazines list.
Sure, I’m biased, but I could easily make the case for Marketing, having spent more than 20 years with it. Certainly in my decade plus as the top editorial person, the magazine was either the number one, two or three performer (usually vying with CA Magazine) at the Kenneth R. Wilson Awards recognizing excellence in the Canadian business press. Rare was the year our editorial team didn’t pick up at least three or four gold or silver prizes. And that kind of record was also the case under my immediate predecessors Wayne Gooding and Colin Muncie. In fact Muncie, who was editor from 1972 to 1992 and a senior staffer for the better part of a decade before that, was one of the first recipients of the Canadian Business Press’s Harvey S. Southam lifetime achievement award. Going further back, when the marketing industry’s leading association, the Association of Canadian Advertisers, instituted it’s lifetime achievement award in 1941, its very first recipient was W.A. Lydiatt, who purchased Marketing in 1918 and was owner/publisher/editor until selling it to Maclean Hunter in 1954.
There are all kinds of tales of colourful characters that worked on Marketing over its now near century of publication. My favorite character has to be Bertram Brooker, an adman/ journalist/ novelist/ poet/ actor/ artist and apparently general gadabout in Toronto during the second quarter of the 20th century. But as historian Russell Johnston puts it in his book Selling Themselves: the Emergence of Canadian Advertising, Brooker was “no amateur.” Brooker is credited as being the first Canadian to put on an exhibit of abstract art in Toronto. He was the winner of the first Governer General’s prize for fiction in 1937 with his novel Think of the Earth. And between stints working as a copywriter at a number of Toronto ad agencies in the 1920s and 30s, he also worked as a writer for the Globe and for Marketing during this era, acting as publisher from 1924 to 1926. He is thought to have arranged for Group of Seven member, and friend, Frank Johnston to redesign the magazine’s masthead in late 1920s.
Still, I’d argue any trade publication worth its salt could boast of staffers or contributors with a similar intimate history with its target readership. Marketing’s advantage on that front is it has had a relatively large staff throughout a longstanding existence, and the fact that it does cover a world that overlaps the one we magazine people work in.
And there’s the rub on which trade titles had the most influence: its almost like you’re picking which business sectors are more important by selecting any particular journal as being more influential overall. And on many levels you really can only judge a book if you understand and know the sector intimately.
I’d argue Masthead is a great example of a trade title that does an exemplary job of serving its readers’ needs and having a wide influence on a relatively tight budget. But then, it is also the trade title for my business, so I pay a lot of attention to it. But, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves here: the magazine industry, while important to us, isn’t the most important or influential segment of the Canadian print media sector let alone the entire Canadian economy. (I’d also argue, maybe on a technicality, that as good and influential as Masthead is, it would be bad form to allow itself to be included on its own list.)
Similarly, I’ve always admired the good job Quill & Quire does, and it for sure has always had a disproportionately huge footprint in the culture/book industry. But there again, it’s something closer to my heart than, say, the trucking industry. (And I say that with no disrespect to Today's Trucking, which is also a consistent award winner at the KRWs, and whose long time editorial director Rolf Lockwood was also a Harvey Southam lifetime achievement award winner in 2003.)
By the standard of true influence being linked to the industry a magazine serves, The Northern Miner, around since 1915, should be a big contender, although I honestly know little about it. Oilweek is another quality title in a major economic sector for this country. So is Pulp and Paper Canada. An Investment Executive or Advisor’sEdge clearly have clout in the big money area (and I’d give Advisor’sEdge extra marks for setting some new high standards in Canadian trade magazine art direction in its early years in the 1990s). Canadian Lawyer, Lawyers Weekly and relative newcomer Lexpert –not to mention the bar association’s own book, National- are all very well done and have significant clout in an important segment of society. Medical Post has a long record of award winning journalism in a sector that is literally life and death for Canadians. Any one of them is more important and has more influence with readers with more influence than, say, a Marketing magazine, Masthead or Quill & Quire.
Other trade titles that I think have been very good strong in recent years, based largely but not exclusively on their KRW performances, include:
• Azure in design, architecture and art (so good, you don’t even think of it as a trade title).
• CA Magazine. Yes accountants deserve a good read too, and they get it. And no one has had a better run at the KRWs for the past decade.
• Environmental Solid Waste & Recycling. Now here’s an important sector these days, and these folks, like so many good trade, usually set the agenda for the daily press and broadcasters.
• OHS Canada Magazine. Ditto to the above two titles.
• Salon, largely on the strength of its consistently wonderful art direction.
But, as I’ve said, I can’t say any one of the 18 titles I've mentioned here so far is any more influential than another beyond their immediate audiences.
If you can have only one trade mag on the influence list –and I think there should be at least one– you probably can’t go wrong with Canadian Grocer. It wasn’t necessarily the first or best Canadian b-to-b magazine in history, but it was the first one John B. Maclean started in 1887, when he was a 24 year old newspaper reporter at the Toronto Mail, and one that became the keystone to his publishing empire, which dominated the trade and later consumer industry until it was swallowed by Rogers in 1994 (and really continues, under its new identity and name, to be the Canadian magazine industry’s 900 pound gorilla).
It helps that the grocery industry is an evergreen sector (no matter how poor economic conditions might get, people still gotta eat, right) that remains largely domestically controlled. (As an aside, it was always somewhat amusing and bemusing to me at Marketing magazine that while branded packaged goods companies, generally near the top of the food chain in our reader universe, were among the toughest to get any kind of consistent comment from by our staff, these companies would bend over backwards to speak to Grocer. In Grocer’s world, after all, they are the suppliers not the big fish.)
But the magazine in and of itself has remained relevant, and very profitable, over the decades. Its editors and publishers have always done their best to get close to their readers, find out what they need and want, and deliver it.
Two little anecdotes relating to Grocer from Maclean Hunter at One Hundred, a special perfect-bound magazine issued to all company staff by MH during the company’s 1987 centennial.
First, it describes B.T. (Burt) Huston –who stepped down as Grocer editor in 1954 after 46 years with MH– as a “classic editor” in terms of service to and leadership in his field. “His stature was so much that 200 leaders of the food industry gathered from across the country to honour him at a testimonial dinner in 1949. At the time no other business-press editor in Canada had ever received such a distinction.”
Second, it quotes George Condon, the Grocer publisher/editor in 1987 (and for several decades... and like Huston, an eventual inductee into The Food Industry Association of Canada’s hall of fame), as saying: “I see myself about 95% in the food industry and 5% in the publishing industry.” And that view of being “of” the industry you serve rather than apart from it is one Condon said was shared by J. B. Maclean. “There was no question that he was totally devoted to the grocery industry when he launched Canadian Grocer. He already had a reputation of being a commodities expert in North America.”
That degree of passion about and immersion in the industry one covers is always a telling attitude in a B-to-B editor. Sideline observers and clock-watching hacks are seldom influential players in the trade space. Those who are passionate and dig in can be. And that usually seperates the good magazine from the influential magazine.