The Walrus magazine premiered in September 2003 with the intent of creating a national institution comparable to American publications such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Currently, it produces 10 issues a year and has a circulation of approximately 60,000 (10-15,000 in newstand sales and 40-45,000 in subscriptions), and functions as a charitable, not-for-profit organization. When Ken Alexander, one of the magazine’s founders, stepped down as editor in 2008, John Macfarlane took over the position. Macfarlane has acted as the editor of Toronto Life (1992-2007), publisher of the now-defunct Saturday Night magazine (1980-87), publisher and editor-in-chief of the Financial Times (1987-90), and director of news at CTV (1991-92). Marfarlane sat down with us to discuss Canadian journalism and the unique challenges of running “Canada’s best magazine.”
Tim Legault: Magazine sales are down across the board. How is The Walrus faring?
John Macfarlane: Newstand sales are down, but subscriptions may or may not be, because publishers can control their subscription circulation. Basically, the more money you spend, the higher your circulation. Some publishers have the money to kind of mitigate market trends and some don’t. In the case of The Walrus we don’t, but we have a high renewal rate. We are struggling at the newstands, like everybody. I can’t put it in percentage terms, but I think I read that Maclean’s is down 15 per cent in the last year at the newstand. We would be down less than that but we are down, yet our renewal rate is so high that our subscriptions remain relatively stable.
TL: Is there a big enough market in Canada for a general interest magazine like The Walrus?
JM: No, just as there’s not a large enough audience in the United States—a much, much bigger country—for magazines like Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Harper’s is supported by the McArthur Foundation. The Atlantic is owned by a dot-com kajillionaire who’s content to continue to publish the magazine even though it loses money. If The New Yorker weren’t owned by a privately held company, Condé Nast, which has no public shareholders, I don’t think The New Yorker would be in the situation it is in today. So the answer to your question is: Canada is not a big enough country to support a magazine like The Walrus, just as it could not support a magazine like Saturday Night, where I worked in the ‘80s. The founders of The Walrus did something really smart: they set it up as a foundation, knowing that it was going to need philanthropic support, and put it in a position where it could go out and ask for that support and give people a tax receipt in return for it.
TL: Were there challenges you hadn’t expected when you came on as editor of The Walrus?
JM: One of my criticisms of The Walrus in its first five years was that it seemed to me a little unfocused. You should be able to figure out by reading a magazine what its mission is, and I couldn’t figure out what The Walrus’s mission was. I couldn’t have said to you, “This story belongs in The Walrus and this one doesn’t”—and you have to be in that situation. One of the first things we did was impose a definition on the magazine. The definition the staff and I agreed upon was that The Walrus should be a magazine about Canada and its place in the world. When I was at Saturday Night, its definition would have been that Saturday Night is a magazine about Canada, full-stop. [At The Walrus], we thought that the country had changed since the 1980s—that people are more inclined to think of themselves these days as both Canadians and citizens of the world. So we thought that last addition, “Canada and its place in the world,” was an important one. That is a huge challenge. It is a huge challenge because we have such limited resources, as you can see by looking around, and even if we had unlimited resources, it would be a huge challenge because to do that job, you have to have information that’s very difficult for any one person or group of people to have.
TL: Why is it so hard for a Canadian general interest magazine to be financially viable?
JM: General interest magazines have not been doing well anywhere for the past 25 years, and the magazines that do well are more targeted, with some notable exceptions. I mean you’d have to describe The New Yorker as a general interest magazine. But having said that, it’s a kind of general interest magazine aimed at a niche—a small niche. The real answer is: in Canada, which is a tiny, tiny country, the challenge is much bigger—because if you attract one per cent of the American reading public, you’ve got a huge audience. If you attract one per cent of the Canadian reading public, and you’d have to take Quebec out of there, so it’s one per cent not of 33 million but 20-some-odd million, you haven’t got a lot of people. Proportionally, it’s not a lot of people. You have to keep going back to my comment about Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker: they are three magazines that in a country of 350 million people, struggle. Harper’s, which is 150 years old or something, has around 200,000 paid circulation in the United States. We have 60,000 paid circulation in a country a fraction of that size, so we’re really punching above our weight, as did Saturday Night.
TL: The magazine was granted charitable status in 2005. Right now the homepage for The Walrus website features a large banner asking for donations to help keep the publication running. Is it disheartening that a major Canadian magazine can only exist as a charity rather than as a purely commercial enterprise?
JM: Not at all. Do I find it disheartening that Harper’s can only exist with MacArthur’s $25 million? This is not an indication of failure. It is just the reality that a magazine that sets out to do what The Walrus sets out to do is not going to have 200,000 circulation in a country as small as Canada. Because it is designed not to have a circulation of 200,000, the fact that it doesn’t have an audience that big doesn’t make it a failure. On the other hand, it has to survive and so the only other revenue stream is fundraising. Look through the ages: great artists and great art always had to have patronage. I’m not saying The Walrus is great art, but I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with requiring patronage in order to survive. There’s nothing inherently bad about that. It’s not a sign of weakness.
TL: I don’t necessarily mean weakness on the publisher’s part. Is it disheartening that there isn’t enough demand?
JM: This is the great reality. The sort of elephant in the room, where culture and the arts are involved in Canada, is that it is a small country. High culture and the arts do not have mass appeal anywhere. That’s why the Canadian Opera Company needs supporters. That’s why the Stratford Festival needs supporters. There are a number of magazines in Canada, like Canadian Art, which also require patronage in order to do what they do.
TL: Are you seeing a change in what readers want in a Canadian magazine?
JM: I don’t think so, but as I said at the outset, we’re not a magazine that goes out and says to the marketplace, “What do you want, and we’ll give it to you.” That’s not the way the process works here. The way the process works here is that we take a look at the country and what it’s doing and what the people in it are doing and we say, “What’s significant? What’s interesting? What would I, as an intelligent Canadian who feels like a stakeholder in Canada—what would I want to know?” And that’s what we give them. As long as people write us a cheque once a year and say, “Please send me 10 more issues of your magazine,” we assume they are liking what we’re doing. That’s why, incidentally, paying for something is so important. If you give it away, how do you know if people actually like it?
TL: Is Canadian journalism experiencing a slow death or a gradual transformation?
JM: I think there’s a lot of hysteria out there right now about the state of journalism, which has been occasioned by the Internet, digital media, and the fact that newspapers, which were once—I hesitate to use the words “obscenely profitable,” but profitable well beyond what most businesses would have thought of as healthy profits—are no longer that profitable. Some of them are nevertheless profitable and many of them are not as profitable as they should be because during the ‘80s and ‘90s they acquired way too much debt, so they are having to service debt. The shareholders took out a lot of equity. Newspapers are having to work on a different business model, which is going to involve the Internet for sure, as are magazine publishers and book publishers. All of that is just plumbing. The Internet is just plumbing and what goes into the plumbing is what’s really important. I think good journalism today is much the same as good journalism was 25 years ago or 50 years ago, and I think it will be the same 25 years from now and 50 years from now. How it’s distributed and disseminated will change. We’re not seeing the death of journalism.
TL: Advances in information technology have made the world hungry for news not just about local or national issues, but the world at large. With a growing interconnectivity among countries, are Canadian publications dealing with Canadian issues as relevant as they used to be?
JM: The Walrus, from the very beginning, had an interest in the world and things going on outside Canada. But it doesn’t make any sense to me to attempt to do something you don’t have the resources, human or financial, to do. We do not pretend to be telling Canadian readers about the world. There are other publications that can do that part better than we can. We’re trying to tell Canadian readers about Canada and its place in the world. We go beyond Canada’s borders, in what we do, when there is an obvious Canadian connection, but beyond that, it just makes no sense for us to compete with The Economist or Foreign Affairs or whatever.
TL: What does the future hold for The Walrus?
JM: I hope that when you are as old as I am, The Walrus will still be around. I think our country deserves its own magazine. The problem with Harper’s, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker is that they are all great magazines, but they’re not our magazines and they don’t talk about us; they barely know we exist. I’d like our finances to become stable enough, soon enough, that we can do things like pay interns, pay writers more, and be able to spend more money on our journalism—to be able to spend more on travel, which is very difficult for us to do now.
