The Walrus celebrates its 10th anniversary
With 10 years under its belt and a readership of 250,000, the magazine is on solid footing. But it wasn’t always like that. It’s no surprise that the magazine industry is struggling, and the very fact The Walrus is celebrating its 10th anniversary is a “miracle,” says its co-publisher.
It’s been a good year for The Walrus: with 10 years under its belt and a readership of 250,000, the magazine is on solid footing.
But it wasn’t always like that. It’s no surprise that the magazine industry is struggling, so the very fact The Walrus is celebrating its 10th anniversary is a “miracle,” says its co-publisher Shelley Ambrose.
When Ambrose first came on as co-publisher and executive director of The Walrus foundation in 2006, The Walrus was financially a mess and its future was precarious. The charitable foundation didn’t have proper financial statements and had run up a deficit of $750,000 in just three years.
“The magazine was burning through money. It was in trouble,” she said. “It took us about a year just to get all the financial paperwork sorted.”
Although she didn’t work up the corporate ladder through advertising or circulation as most publishers do—Ambrose had years of experience in fundraising, event planning and producing at the CBC, and that was just what the ailing magazine needed. It took discipline, but The Walrus turned around things around with Ambrose at the helm. When Ambrose joined The Walrus, the foundation had one funder who was getting impatient, zero corporate partners and no events. Now, it has more than a 1,000 donors, dozens of corporate partners and runs 30 events a year.
“One of the best things the founders did was that they realized that a magazine like this in Canada could not survive on a traditional business model, which is advertising and circulation,” she said. “There aren’t enough advertisers who want general interest magazines, and you can’t charge subscribers what it costs to print it, never mind what it takes to make it.”
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Today, The Walrus Foundation events now make twice as much money as advertising.
Ambrose is a big fan of what she calls the “Wayne Gretzky attitude.”
“You need to go where the puck is going,” she said. In The Walrus universe, that means launching Walrus TV in 2012, which showcases documentaries made from cover stories in the magazine, a responsive design across all platforms, e-books and events.
“The goal of the future is that almost every story will be on every single Walrus platform,” she said. “And all of those things are revenue generating.”
Editorially, editor and co-publisher John Macfarlane said The Walrus is finally getting where it needs to go. “It can take about three to five years to get a magazine where you want to take it, and it’s finally showing,” said. “Our story sense is getting better and better … our understanding of the Canadian freelance scene is getting better.”
Still, there are several things that gnaw at Macfarlane. He’d like to hire more staff, pay writers more and finally start paying interns—who right now get paid zilch. He’d also like to expand his readership across Canada, which means covering stories across Canada. Currently 60 per cent of its readers are in Ontario and another 16 per cent in B.C.
“We have the ability to do that … but on a limited basis,” he said. “Sometimes it means we find a writer who is locally based, even though they might not be the best writer for that story.”
So where is the puck going next for The Walrus?
Right now the brand is dependent on the magazine, “but maybe that won’t be the case for the future,” Ambrose said. She says The Walrus doesn’t need to launch any more platforms, but it’s constantly in need of money and staff.
“When I started, our survival was hourly. And then after about a year, it became daily and then weekly and monthly,” she said. “I believe our survival is now annually, meaning I can look at 2014 now, which I’m doing, and figure out what we need to raise and how many individual donors and corporate partners we need.”
If The Walrus can convince its supporters to turn into long-term donors, “that would change our lives.” The foundation hopes to raise $5 million by 2017, basically raising about $1 million annually—that’s the thrust of its Campaign for Optimistic Canadians.
“It would let us actually say we have a future for the next five years … at least.”
Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.
September 26, 2013
Is 250,000 the number of
Is 250,000 the number of Walrus subscribers or the number of 'readers' as determined by a survey?
John Macfarlane has been in the game for something like a half century. Is it possible he doesn't know the 'Canadian freelance scene' yet? Three to five years to get the mag's 'story sense' right? 60% of the readers are in Ontario and I'll bet the majority of these are in Toronto, where he has edited or published at least three 'general interest' publications.
What 'the founders did' to circumvent the dearth of ad and subscriber revenue was to lobby successfully for charitable tax status so that it could launch the Foundation, which then could go cap-in-hand to corporations. Maisonneuve, which started about the same time, tried the same but failed. Nevertheless, Maisonneuve survives.
Both mags were founded by GenX sons of wealthy Montreal families, which were dinged for millions in start-up costs. Here's a piece I wrote about that, a few years back:
LCC — Lower Canada College, founded in Montreal in 1861– is a rich kids’ school, the kind that parents who have to ask the cost of tuition can’t afford. Paul Martin’s sons went there to prepare them to be CSL millionheirs.
On a Thursday evening in mid-February, Ken Alexander and Derek Webster are invited to kick off LCC’s 2005 “speakers’ series” by discussing the state of Canada’s magazine industry. They have little to say about the state of the industry as a whole, other than that it is starving. But they talk at length about their own operations.
Ken Alexander is editor and publisher of The Walrus magazine. He actually attended LCC in the lower grades. His father was a wealthy lawyer.
Derek Webster, who is editor and publisher of Maisonneuve magazine, is arguably the richer of the two since he is descended of a blue-ribbon family with wealth based on distributing fuel in Montreal. Webster’s father was editor of both the Globe and Mail and The Montreal Gazette, at different times, and owned Saturday Night magazine before he sold it to Conrad Black. His grandfather owned the Globe and Mail until he sold it to Roy Thomson.
Webster speaks first. Canadian magazines would be healthier, he says, if subsidies from the federal government were not spread as widely as they are but concentrated among the worthy which, he didn’t say but we are to assume, includes Maisonneuve. It would help if foundations in Canada would step up to support publications of value, which is what has sustained Harper’s Magazine in the United States.
Alexander rises to say he agrees with what Webster has just said. His strength is not the reasoned argument but the quip. He plays for laughs. But he apparently is caught off guard by a question about foundation support for The Walrus. He says no, there’s no such support and rambles to a non-sequitur about plans the magazine has to sponsor conferences. This is an odd response and must have surprised his co-presenter. Industry media have extensively reported, with never a denial from anyone, that the magazine was launched in September 2003 with a $5 million war chest from the Chawkers Foundation. Chawkers is a private, one might even say secretive, foundation created in 1966 to fund educational and environmental causes. It was endowed by Charles Alexander, Ken’s father. It is now run from Ken Alexander’s home in Toronto.
To the question, “how do you pay your staff, how do you get started, how do you pay yourselves,” Alexander turns to Webster and asks rhetorically, “Do you pay yourself? I don’t pay myself.” To which Webster replies, “I don’t either.” Of course they both had the good sense to choose wealthy parents and can do as they please without fear of missing any meals or failing to clothe the kids. No mention is made of this.
Alexander makes several references to editors who don’t know their own skills as editors, or writers who don’t know they are writers, until he discovers them. He doesn’t point out that The Walrus went through three editors in its first two years before he discovered his own talents in this direction.
A questioner asks whether there is anything peculiar to Canada that dictates the merging of the roles of publisher and editor, joint titles enjoyed by both speakers as well as by the recently appointed chief of Canada’s oldest and largest newsmagazine, Maclean’s. Alexander embarks on a lengthy disparagement of the post of publisher. The publisher is akin to a consultant, he says, who gives advice but has no responsibility for implementation. It’s a title often given to an ad salesman as a reward for performance. Webster looks embarrassed but says nothing. Neither points out that the publisher traditionally represents the owner and appoints the editor. Neither points out that he is the owner and has appointed himself editor.
All around, a bravura performance. Prolonged applause.