Saturday Night’s final page?

Latest publisher closes money-loser Venerated magazine had many owners

Saturday Night, Canada’s oldest magazine, is dead. Again. Sharon McAuley, the magazine’s publisher for parent company St. Joseph’s Media, said the magazine simply couldn’t turn a profit. “ It’s hard for a general interest magazine in Canada to survive,” she said. No kidding. For those of you keeping score, this is the fourth such brush with mortality in the magazine’s 118- year history. St. Joseph’s Media is only its most recent executioner.

Saturday Night

has stumbled financially for decades, through a long, slow decline through the ’ 50s until it ceased publication briefly in 1963, and again in 1974. The first resurrection was by editor Arnold Edinborough, who spent $ 100,000 of his own money to revive it; the second, 11 years later, was enabled by publisher Edgar Cowan, who brought it back from the dead with a $ 100,000 gift from Imperial Oil. When the magazine delivered the unheard- of — a profit — in 1978, Norman Webster bought it and took care of a subsequent

media columnist for Toronto Life. St. Joseph’s even increased publication last year, from 6 to 10 issues, in hopes of raising its profile.

“ It’s not like suddenly we felt like we could build a better mousetrap,” McAuley said. “ The feeling was, whatever the odds, the idea of Saturday Night and its contribution to the Canadian intellectual and cultural landscape was too important to just let pass.”

It’s a feeling that has been shared by so many of St. Joseph’s predecessors. Saturday Night was born in 1887, the conservative organ of the white, English power elite, founded by Edmund Sheppard. But the depression era brought the birth of the magazine’s philosophical positioning — intellectually rigorous, cultured, urbane and political astute — at the hands of editor B. K. Sandwell. Throughout his tenure, writing from virtually every prominent Canadian author, as well as the work of such prominent artists as members of the Group of Seven would appear in the magazine’s pages.

Sandwell would preside over the final years of the magazine’s perennial profitability, riding it into the down years of the 1950s. He left in 1951, just before millionaire Jack Kent Cooke, who later founded the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, would take hold, and watch his investment tumble into a long, slow slide.

In 1963, things had gone so sour at the magazine that it was acquired by Percy Bishop, a member of the Social Credit Party of Canada, who hope to turn it into a party organ. The plan soured quickly, though, and the magazine actually ceased publication in 1963. Edinborough rescued the magazine, edited it for five years, and then handed it off in 1968 to Fulford. But the magazine, on shaky ground, was tumbling toward its second death, only to be resurrected, of course, in 1974.

Fulford defined the modernera Saturday Night, giving writers like Dennis Lee and Margaret Atwood their first national exposure and expanding the magazine’s cultural coverage. The fuel still firing the magazine through these years, and many subsequent, was no mystery to string of money- losing years until, in 1987, he found another wealthy benefactor unperturbed by its losses: Conrad Black.

Black maintained the magazine as a charity case, accepting the bleeding as part of the stewardship of the distinguished title. But in 2000, hoping to staunch the flow, he folded it into his National Post newspaper as a weekly insert.

There, it went on to hemorrhage ever further, and when Izzy Asper’s CanWest Global Media acquired its controlling stake in the Post in 2001, the magazine was quietly snuffed. But Saturday Night had at least one last Lazarus act left in it. Days after CanWest announced its death, Greg MacNeil, then with MultiVision publishing, acquired the rights to the title and resurrected it — again — as a bi- monthly. When St. Joseph’s bought MultiVision in 2003, Saturday Night came with it. And so, with one profitable year in more than half a century, St. Joseph’s did to Saturday Night what so many before them had done: Poured money in, hoping this time would be different. The magazine was redesigned, the editorial direction revamped. A breezier, conversationalseeming magazine emerged, more mass-culture driven, but still with some quiet intellectual flourish.

“ I thought it was pretty good. I thought we’d see it for a while yet,” said Robert Fulford, a former editor of the magazine, and him.

“ Various levels of affection, respect and hope,” Fulford said. “ It’s suffered many deaths, but there’s always been someone who was willing to pick it back up and start it moving again.” Whether there remains a white knight willing to perform yet another reanimation is a point of debate. In a tightening Canadian publishing world dependent on advertising, tightly focused publications that deliver narrowly defined demographics — age groups and income levels — seem to be the only winners.

“ Saturday Nightwas a shotgun in an era of sniper rifles,” said William Shields, editor of Masthead magazine, which covers the publishing industry.

In a world of “ narrowcasting” — pointed content aimed at specific targets — “ Saturday Night was anything but,” Shields said.

St. Joseph’s own portfolio is telling of the trend. Last year, it launched Wish magazine, about, ostensibly, shopping for young urban women. Around the same time, it killed off Elm Street, a women’s magazine with a broad mandate to cover anything from politics to culture to health to sports. Where — and if — Saturday Night might still fit is anyone’s guess. The magazine had lost 10 per cent of its readership in the past year, and the numbers were already dire. The magazine counted 735,000 readers per issue; Reader’s Digest, by contrast, drew 7,432,000.

“ We’re getting further and further away from the era when Saturday Night

was an important national institution,” said John Fraser, who edited the magazine for seven years in the late ’ 80s and early ’ 90s. McAuley said the magazine is officially “on hiatus,” which means the company could be open to another try, either by themselves or someone else.

“It’s a great brand,” Shields said. “ You don’t build a name like that overnight.”

Fulford, for one, thinks — once again — that reports of the magazine’s demise could be slightly exaggerated.

“ I don’t think we should take this death too seriously,” he said. “ Death is a serious matter — but not always.”