Revamped Maclean’s revives current affairs format
A redesigned Maclean’s magazine will begin arriving in mailboxes and hitting newsstands Monday.
The weekly magazine, scheduled to celebrate its 100th anniversary Tuesday, is undergoing what editors call its most significant redesign and repositioning since it became a newsweekly in 1978.
Publisher and editor-in-chief Ken Whyte is promising a return to a current affairs emphasis and a significantly thicker magazine with more to read. The tagline, “Canada’s weekly newsmagazine,” has been dropped and the first issue is 80 pages.
The cover story of the redesigned magazine is a “special investigation” of the way data brokers, most of them in the U.S., are accumulating private and personal information about Canadian citizens.
To prove the vulnerability of Canadians’ private information, national correspondent Jonathon Gatehouse bought the phone records of Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
This is a foretaste of the new style ñ breaking stories instead of following them ñ that Whyte hopes will make the venerable magazine more relevant to readers.
“People often say that the 24/7 news environment makes weeklies a dinosaur in the field of current affairs. I frankly disagree entirely,” he said in an interview with CBC News.
“I think the more the world goes to instant headlines and minute-to-minute updates, the more need there is for a weekly like us to stand apart and look at what’s really important out there and what isn’t.”
The redesigned cover features a full-page photo of Stoddart, looking startled, and five throw boxes pointing to stories inside. In the future, cover photos will be “candid,” Whyte says. Also, a maple leaf has replaced the apostrophe in Maclean’s.
These are tough times for generalist magazines that focus on news and Maclean’s has seen both ad revenue and circulation slip over the past decade.
“There was a danger that the old model wasn’t working and if we didn’t make substantial change, we were just going to drive it into the ground,” Whyte said .
Whyte, who took over the magazine six months ago, is promising more original reporting and an increase in investigative stories. Both national and international reporting will be expanded, with reestablishment of foreign bureaus in Washington, Europe and the Middle East.
He aims to make the magazine “more provocative” and has promised regular columns from Barbara Amiel, Joseph Boyden who writes on Canadian affairs, Linda Frum, Paul Wells, Scott Feschuk and Kate Fillion.
Stories in the current issue include “Here comes another nasty election campaign” and “Why France is worse than it looks.”
The arts and culture pages have a new look with a major piece planned for each issue, a double-page spread on people, and the writing of Brian Johnson, who has long been the magazine’s senior entertainment writer and film critic.
Whyte, who helped launch the National Post in 1998, credited his predecessors with beginning a turnaround at the magazine. He has tried different tactics, including trying to attract more readers by following the successful model of entertainment weeklies, like People and Us.
“I thought we should test and just see what would happen when we threw a couple of celebrities on the cover √± what kind of response we’d get √± and they bombed,” he says.
Maclean’s now is promising personalities “covered for their newsworthiness, rather than their celebrity status.”
“This is not the end of the story,” Whyte says. “The magazine will continue to evolve significantly over the next several months as we continue to refine our pages as well as make further announcements about new staff at Maclean’s.”
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