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| Byfield-inspired magazine rides out of the West - Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 15:55 |
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PUBLICATION: National Post -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Byfield-inspired magazine rides out of the West: Conservative perspective: Subscriber list tops 10,000, well ahead of business plan -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After three decades of losing money -- its record broken by a brief period of profitability 20 years ago -- the Byfield family magazine will make its hopeful return to newsstands this week. Renamed The Western Standard, the former Alberta Report aims to be a national conservative newsmagazine in the tradition laid out by founder Ted Byfield.Z Already, 40,000 copies of the inaugural issue have been printed, and its subscriber list has topped 10,000, putting the business plan five months ahead of schedule. But, like the Report before it, the Western Standard's shot at a national market is loaded with risk. "We're national class. In some ways even international class ... We, I think, have achieved the balance between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism, which is the defining tension on the right these days," publisher Ezra Levant said yesterday. The Western Standard's management team is headed by Stephen Johnston, Sean McKinsley and Matthew Johnston, senior executives from JMCK Communications Inc. The last time the Report went national, in 1999, it was out of desperation more than optimism: "We can't survive just in the West," Link Byfield, son of Ted, said at the time. Three years later, after falling far short of its goal of 25,000 subscriptions in Ontario, the Report, gave up on money altogether to become a non-profit lobby group. "It left its Alberta roots behind and attempted to redefine itself as a national magazine of social conservatism," journalist Paula Simons, who worked at the magazine in the late 1980s, wrote in the Edmonton Journal. "As its message became more and more shrill, mainstream readers, especially those who read the magazine for its Alberta perspective, dropped their subscriptions." Launched more than 30 years ago as the St. John's Edmonton Report, the magazine's pro-guns, pro-beef, pro-Christian and free-marketeering mindset earned it a loyal subscriber base in Alberta. It became profitable when it expanded in the 1980s, with three regional editions across the West. Its ideological strengths then became weaknesses, said Ann Meredith Brown, associate editor at Masthead magazine, an industry observer. "It was that strong, Christian aesthetic to it that might have turned national advertisers off," she said. National advertisers were reluctant to associate their products with such "controversial, Christian, conservative viewpoints," she said. "Some of their competitors might think that they are optimistic in thinking they can be a national magazine." Others are hopeful. "The Western Standard has a giant field of opportunity almost to itself," writes columnist and author David Frum in the first issue. "West means new, open-minded, pioneering, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, meritocracy, that's what West means," Mr. Levant said. "If Maclean's magazine is vanilla, we are a little bit of Tabasco." Mark Steyn, a former National Post columnist, is promoted as the spiciest voice in the magazine, and his debut piece -- a criticism of Liberal rule in Ottawa -- leapfrogs in trademark style from the sponsorship scandal to the Khadr family, and from the gun registry to federalism. Ted Byfield is a columnist, writing about ailing conservative academic Robert Martin and referring to law schools as "feminist seminaries" and Supreme Court judges as "high cardinals of the Sacred College." There is a question and answer session with Jack Layton, the federal NDP leader, a report on the woes of the B.C. Liberal Party, a half-joking proposal to merge Alberta and British Columbia into "Albumbia," and a guide to the Conservative leadership race. Adrienne Clarkson, the high-flying Governor-General, is mocked as "Avian Clarkson." |