The changing life of magazines; demise vs. digital

Graydon Carter is retiring after 25 years as editor of Vanity Fair. Whether or not you are a reader of the flashy, perfume-strip-reeking, scandal- and celebrity-obsessed magazine, this is a journalistic milestone worth noting. Not so much for a career that made the Ontario-born and -raised Carter rich and famous himself, but for what his path says about the ever-changing magazine industry.

Carter, who dropped out of both the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, got his start in journalism at The Canadian Review in Ottawa, where he soon became editor. It was a new general interest publication with lofty literary aspirations that garnered some awards but failed in 1978 after only five years of operation.

At that point, Carter, then 28, packed up and left Canada, and the first of his three wives, described as a pretty Frenchcanadian museum worker, and moved to the Big Apple.

He found work at Time and then moved to the now defunct Life. In 1986 he and two partners founded Spy which quickly became a sensation for poking fun at the high and mighty, mostly of New York City society. Donald Trump was a favourite target and Spy took special delight in tormenting the “short-fingered vulgarian,” as Carter loved to call him.

In 1992, Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair - though he apparently had his heart set on The New Yorker. Spy didn’t last long after that, folding in 1998, leaving the literary world with the “Separated at Birth” feature the magazine actually trademarked.

The same year, another U.S. magazine that shaped the cultural and literary perception of many a young American and Canadian also gave up the ghost. National Lampoon’s demise - chronicled recently in Vanity Fair - was as outrageous, ridiculous and hilarious as much of its drug-culture inspired content.

One unlikely survivor of the great culling of mass readership magazines has been MAD magazine, which seems to have taken on new life with the seemingly limitless stock of satirical material generated by the Trump phenomenon. An edition last year blared on the cover : No Trump In This Issue, but, of course, there was. Naturally, MAD mascot Alfred E. Neuman has made his appearance in the guise of First Son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Here in Canada, many magazines have fallen victim to changing times and tastes. Saturday Night, Flare, Canadian Business are a few examples; in Quebec, two once-popular humour magazines, Croc and Safarir, are both kaput.

Still, dozens of Canadian magazines soldier on, thanks to their digital editions and, in many cases, taxpayers’ dollars. According to data published last month on the Media in Canada website, the most widely read magazine in English-speaking Canada is the Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest with 4.36 million readers per issue, combined print and digital; print alone is 3.98 million readers.

Two free magazines - Cineplex Magazine and Walmart’s Live Better - are next on the list at about four million readers per issue. The next paid subscription magazine in the top five is Canadian Living at 3.77 million readers.

In Quebec, the top paid magazines in terms of number of readers are Ricardo’s cooking mag at 1.78 million combined print and digital, and Coup de Pouce at 1.35 million.

The data shows that magazines in Quebec generally are holding their own with modest increases in digital subscriptions compensating for dropping print circulation by mail or news-stands.

Still, it’s hardly boom time for magazines anywhere in the country with social media, notably Google and Facebook, steadily becoming the source of news and information for more and more people, though neither of these sites has any claim to original journalism, and certainly not local story-gathering.

Graydon Carter, in his editorial swan song, including an obligatory shot at Trump, observes about the future of magazines: “Great journalism doesn’t come cheap, and increasingly, if slowly, readers appear to be willing to step up and pay for it - through apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and whatever else someone is inventing right now.”

We’ll soon see how much governments are willing to step up. There are reports the federal government is preparing to boost financial support for magazines and newspapers in Canada in the budget on Feb. 27.