The greatest Canadian magazines 2: Old school edition
Topic: Media
More on the Masthead 20 most influential Canadian magazines of all time exercise I posted on a few days ago.
One of the big challenges with a list like this is that it tends to be dominated by the living memory of the current generation. It usually ends up being the top players from mostly last 20 or 30 years, maybe 40. Which is fine because these thing are really about the collective memory of us now, not a true history.
Still the completest in me wanted to take a look further back for candidate magazines that I either dimly remember, have forgotten about or never even knew about. To do this I’ve returned to my J-school notes and texts-most notably Paul Rutherford’s 1978 history The Making of Canadian Media. I’ve also scanned and the Canadian Encyclopedia online (whose entries on magazines appear to date from 1986, happily the year I entered the industry), and revisited sections of Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising, Russell Johnston’s excellent 2000 book looking at the rise of modern marketing advertising here, and the mass media industries with it, from about 1890 to the early 1930s.
Some cool stories here, although just how influential they all were is an open question.
• The Nova Scotia Magazine: Don’t know much about it, or how influential really, but I do know it is credited as the first Canadian magazine. This from the Canadian Encyclopedia: “The first Canadian magazine, edited by the Rev William Cochran and printed by John Howe, father of reformer Joseph HOWE, was The Nova Scotia Magazine and Comprehensive Review of Literature, Politics, and News. It commenced publication in 1789, lasted 3 years, and was concerned more with British than colonial affairs.”
• Le Magasin de Québec: Also on this topic of first Canadian magazines, the CE states: “The bilingual Le Magasin de Québec was established by Samuel Neilson in Lower Canada's capital and published from 1792 to 1794. It marked the first attempt at drawing the 2 cultures together through a printed medium.”
Also in CE under the topic of French Magazines:
“Early magazines aimed not simply to inform their readers but to instruct them and entertain them. This vision guided Samuel Neilson when he launched The Quebec Magazine/Le magasin de Québec (1792-94), a 64-page bilingual monthly, containing excerpts from European and American publications, and illustrated by what may have been the first engravings ever published in a magazine.”
• Semeur canadien: The small magazine of ideas challenging a conservative establishment in Quebec didn’t start with Cite Libre. This title took on the Catholic church in mid-19th century Quebec, a foe that makes Duplessis look like a pussycat.
Says the Canadian Encyclopedia: “At this time [mid-1800s] magazines began a battle which was to prove decisive for their future, against the Roman Catholic Church, all-powerful in Québec in the 19th century. One of the first major conflicts occurred in 1851 when Narcisse Cyr revealed abuses committed by church officials in Semeur canadien, a magazine declared to be heretical and dangerous, whose readers were threatened with excommunication by the archbishop of Montréal. The battle escalated in 1864 when Pope Pius IX published his Syllabus, banning certain books. Monseigneur Ignace BOURGET then threw himself into a crusade aimed at preventing the appearance of any new publications in Québec. The Index included about 20 000 titles and more than 8000 authors, causing the eventual disappearance of a number of publications, including Le Canada (1889-1909), which had denounced the Catholic school system and abuses of authority committed by the church. It quickly found its place in The Index and sales plummeted from more than $350 a month to a bare $25 in Dec 1893.”
Whew. The Golden Compas is getting off easy.
• Canadian Illustrated News: Founded by the great grandfather of my J-school dean Peter Deberats –as he told us many, many times-, this Montreal-based title is considered a world pioneer in the use of photoengraving.
The Canadian Encyclopedia: “The technique of photoengraving was pioneered in Canada and used first in the immensely successful Canadian Illustrated News, which began operations in 1869 and gained a large following principally because of its vivid portrayal of scenery and its stirring images of the NORTH-WEST REBELLION. Its French counterpart was the technically more accomplished, but generally less commercially successful, L'Opinion publique illustré.”
• Prairie Farmer or Family Herald or both as a joint entry:
In our largely urban modern Canada, we can’t conceive of the size or clout of the farm community in this country before 1950. Or the farm publishing sector. From about 1890s to the 1930s there was an entire genre of agriculture publishing that rivaled the trade and still nascient consumer magazine segments in size and scope. There were lots of specialized titles, but the biggest were a mix of lifestyle and business, which matched the reality of farm life. In 1921, seven of the top 10 Canadian magazines tiles by circulation were farm related (this from a chart in Russell Johnston’s Selling Themselves, based on from compiled in Lydiatt’s book [Lydiatt was by then the owner of Marketing]).
Prairie Farmer, a weekly owned by the Winnipeg Free Press, was one of the best know. It was kind of a version of Maclean’s combined with trade mag for the western farm set, had a circulation of almost 150,000 in the 1920s. It’s eastern counterpart, the Family Herald, owned by the Montreal Star, boasted an even larger circulation of 217,000 in the same era. These publications, in the words of Paul Rutherford (p.46), featured “an impressive compilation of short reports on farm affairs, a news summary, and assorted delights for a family audience.”
• Canadian: The early 20th century version, of which I knew next to nothing until seeing several references to it in Russell Johnston’s Selling Themselves (from which almost all of the following is culled).
Apparently Canadian was an attempt to emulate Harper’s “belle letters” highbrow mag model developed in 1860s south of the border. It was founded in 1893 by Ontario Publishing company, a Toronto book publisher, and was considered a “modest success” until the 1930s. While it never cracked the top 50 in circulation in Canada, it had a loyal elite readership. It peaked in 1919 with a 17,250 monthly circ. A 1924 redesign, which attempted to make it more like the rising “consumer” titles never quite took, and in fact appears to have only ailienated its core readers and hastened its demise.
• Canadian Courier: Again, this is drawn from Russell Johnston who describes Canadian Courier an outright copy of the more street-wise populist U.S. general interest “consumer” magazines like Munsey’s, McClure’s, the Saturday Evening Post etc. flooding into Canada after 1890. It was launched in 1906 by former Canadian editor John A Cooper and by 1919 boasted a 45,000 circulation every two weeks.
Courier was reputedly much more ad friendly than most Canadian titles of the era. Aside from quality paper, larger format and lots of illustration and colour, Courier also adopted the then radical model from the U.S. of actually integrating ads and editorial onto the same page, often in editorial departments that paralleled emerging consumer markets. In 1917, the editor even ran a list of national advertisers and recommended readers patronize them. It was also one of the first Canadian magazines to adopt a flow plan of having open pages up front with turns to the back, stacked with partial ads, that lead readers through the entire book.
Canadian Courier’s arrival may well mark the moment in the magazine business here when the shift from the 19th century almost exclusive focus on readers to a greater attention (although, note, not total attention) to advertiser needs and wants began. It’s a model that’s basically been a given in the business for a century now.
Courier would eventually lose ground in the 1920s to an another magazine that slavishly borrowed American formulas and Canadianized them, Maclean’s.
• Everywoman’s World: Russell Johnston suggests this was probably Canada’s first true “women’s consumer” magazine as we’ve come to know them.
Everywoman’s World was founded in 1913 by Continental Publishing Company. It was the brainchild of Isidor Simonski, who he’d analyzed the results of a campaign to sell a floured essence cooking product to women through existing general interest “consumer” magazines found that no magazine could deliver women exclusively-in fact only boast more than a 50% female readership. So, he figured why not create one that spoke only to women.
It was an almost instant hit. By 1921, Everywoman’s World had the highest per issue circulation of any Canadan magazine with 106,167 (and was apparently the first Canadian title to breach the 100,000 threshold).
• La Revue populaire and/or La Revue moderne: From the Canadian Encyclopedia: “Growing urban concentration and more widespread education meant that traditional magazines no longer met the needs of their readers, who were increasingly drawn from the masses. These readers wanted popularization, variety and light entertainment, as found in American and French magazines. And so La Revue populaire was born (1907-63), whose circulation rose in less than 50 years from 5000 to more than 125 000. Aimed at the whole family, it published short stories, a family column, various pieces of information and, during WWI, news from the Front. But the postwar period was fatal both for it and the austere Canada français (1918-46): faced with ever more competitors, magazines fought for survival by attracting readers with a tempting layout, winning advertisers and, above all, by specializing. La Revue populaire tried to attract a female readership, but they remained faithful to La Revue moderne (1918-1960), one of the first magazines to be run by a woman (Madeleine Huguenin). Very visual, and financed as much by advertising as by sales, this magazine caught the attention of Maclean Hunter Ltd. In October 1960, La Revue moderne merged with a French version of CHATELAINE. Five months later, Châtelaine printed 125 000 copies; the age of modern magazines had definitely come to French Canada.”
• Weekend Magazine (or maybe Canadian or Canadian Weekend): I dimly remember this title from my toddler days, and moreso when it was merged with its rival as Canadian Weekend in the 70s and 80s (an era in which I recall some Roy MacGregor bylines on hockey stories). But in their mid 20th century heyday (say 1925-1965), the rotogravure weekend supplements distributed in major daily newspapers were the country’s mostly widely read magazines. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the combined 2.9 million circulation of Weekend Magazine and rival Star Weekly in 1952 topped the combined circ. of the four leading stand alone magazines (presumably Time, Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s and Chatelaine) by 300,000.
Star Weekly, owned, of course, by the Toronto Star and dating from the teens, developed a huge advantage in the late 1940s when the King government banned the import of U.S. pulp magazines and comic books, but left exempt comics distributed with newspapers. Star Weekly was left as exclusive distributor of some of the most popular U.S. comics (call it the forerunner of the Canwest/CTV business model of getting government protection for your infrastructure, but filling it with popular American content and a smidgen of Cancon).
In reaction, the Montreal Star and Montreal Standard newspapers merged their weekend magazines, both also founded at the beginning of the 20th century, into Weekend Magazine in 1951. By the early 1960s Weekend was “the most popular advertising vehicle in the nation” a circulation over 2 million through its carriage in 41 newspapers. As Jack Granatstein’s Canadian Encylcopedia entry puts it, Weekend “offered high-quality colour reproduction to advertisers, good photographs, feature stories and recipes to readers, and a profit-making supplement that boosted circulation for the newspaper publishers.” A market like that abhors a vacum. So in 1966, the Star combined with the Southam chain to create The Canadian, which resulted in a decade-plus long competition that saw some of the country’s best writers and editors producing excellent magazine journalism.
But both titles were soon fighting a loosing battle. The rise of colour TV in the 60s lead to the diminishing clout of the rotogravures (and of all general interest titles). Weekend merged with Canadian in 1979, morphed into Today in 1980 and then shut down in 1982.
(BTW, in the U.S., Parade magazine is the leading surviving rotogravure. Distributed in 400 newspapers, Parade currently claims to be the country’s most widely read magazine with a circulation of 32 million and a readership of 71 million.)
•Homemakers: It’s not that long ago, but Homemakers was ground breaking in the 1960s and 1970s for its controlled circulation model –now the dominant form for most trade titles- also applied to brother title Quest magazine. This from the Canadian Enclyclopedia, again circa 1986: The term "general-interest magazine" has little relevance in the contemporary market. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the increasing prominence of controlled-circulation magazines. The largest publisher of such magazines is COMAC, which was founded in 1966 and has 8 magazines including Homemaker's / Madame à foyer, Quest (which folded in late 1984) and Western Living. In late 1983 a rival company launched the largest circulation Canadian magazine, Recipes Only, which has a controlled circulation of 2 million readers and is a prime example of the current trend toward publishing for a narrow and specific market. All these magazines endorse doctrines of affluence and have a clear middle- and upper-middle-class consumer bias. They reflect a glistening internationalism rather than a parochial nationalism and, in that sense, are a mirror of contemporary Canadian middle-class aspirations.”
Those last two sentences sums up the big trends in the industry, and culture, for the last 30 years I’d say, perhaps sadly.
And one last pitch from the misty past:
• The Eye Opener: I’ve heard myths about this title, and I’m sure it never had the kind of influence Masthead is looking to celebrate. Or maybe it does. Either way, Bob Edward’s Calgary Eye Opener, which published apparently rather intermittently from 1902 to 1922, sounds like a lot of fun, and just as dangerous as say Frank.
This from Rutherford (p. 44): “…This great ‘moral weekly’ was the satirical voice of an unregenerate lowbrow. Bob Edwards was a Scottish-born adventurer who, after assorted travel, settled down to a life of intermittent alcoholism and journalism in Alberta. His eight-page weekly appeared irregularly, depending on his sobriety, sold for five cents on the streets, and eventually on the train of the Canadian Pacific Railway. By 1911, the Eye Opener enjoyed a circulation of some 26,000 copies in Calgary and throughout the prairies, its fame reaching into Great Britain and the United States. What so charmed readers was the Eye Opener’s compilation of news, gossip, scandal, speculation, fantasy, wit, homilies and fun–all enthused with a love of the ordinary person. Edwards used his weekly to survey the low life of the horse races, prize fights, drinking spots, and the like; to ridicule the pretentions of high society, the ‘holier-than-thou’ attitudes of moralists, the greed of big business, the stupidity and corruption of politicians; to champion women’s rights, minimum wage laws, even briefly prohibition. ..The Eye Opener had no particular impact, even if its satire irritated the high and mighty (once, Lord Strathcona of CPR fame, almost sued for libel [as did Alberta premier A.L. Sifton]). The point is the weekly’s very existence spoke well of a Canada already too notorious for its straight-laced morality and pomposity.”
The Canadian Encylcopedia also has a short funny entry on Edwards.
Variations on the Eye Opener have been recreated over the decades (the CBC Calgary’s morning drive show has adapted the moniker, as has a Ryerson U student paper, amoung others).
Posted by sutter or mckenzie
at 6:10 PM EST
Updated: Thursday, 29 November 2007 7:45 AM EST
