the anatomy of a walrus

jeromy lloyd

The Walrus was going to save print journalism in Canada. It was the idealistic venture into general-interest magazines that was going to defy convention. It was going to present Canada in a global context to its readers here and abroad.

On these points, the jury’s still out.

It began as the brainchild of a publisher and an editor: Ken Alexander and David Berlin. Now only one remains.

Ken Alexander currently holds both positions at The Walrus. This divide between the industry’s church and state has been crossed by others – most recently by Ken Whyte at Maclean’s and Derek Webster at Maisonneuve– but with less public attention. It gave Alexander himself some unexpected notoriety. The media got interested in The Walrus’ entire enterprise, including its five-year, $5 million startup budget from private backers.

So amidst claims that The Walrus has become his personal soapbox, the questions loom: does Alexander’s leadership affect the quality of the magazine? Is Alexander innovative or merely self-indulgent? Is The Walrus going to survive?

Things started when Alexander was senior producer on the CBC news program Counterspin and discovered his thirst for investigative journalism. After booking famed Tory strategist Dalton Camp on the show, Alexander began corresponding with him about the growing quality gap between print and TV journalism.

“It struck me that magazine pieces were getting shorter and shorter,” Alexander said. “Magazines in general were trying to compete with television, which is a completely different medium.”

David Berlin, meanwhile, had tried to convince Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham to let him produce a Canadian-oriented insert for his magazine. He too saw a need for in-depth, long-form journalism in the Canadian print market. He ultimately backed away from the idea, deciding an insert was insufficient. There needed to be a stand-alone Canadian publication, as Alexander later put it, “with no political bias, a magazine that promoted great writing and a magazine that would make accessible to the public important research that otherwise remained in the lofty towers of academia.”

Alexander and Berlin met at a dinner party when introduced by a mutual friend. They got to talking. The desire was there. The vision was clear. All that was needed was the money.

Fortunately, Alexander is a wealthy man.

 

As columnist Robert Fulford put it in Toronto Life, there is a perception that Alexander is where he is because “he brings with him his old family money.” But The Walrus’ publisher downplays this criticism.

“Inheritance is not always a good thing,” Alexander joked as we downed a few pints at Smokeless Joe, his hangout on John Street. The bar is thin, long and dark, not unlike Alexander himself. When we spoke, The Walrus was in its production phase, and the workload had shaded the skin beneath his eyes. His miles-deep voice was rough with fatigue; even the cold beer wasn’t enough to smooth its edges.

When I brought up the $1.5 million of his own money he’s reportedly put into the magazine since its launch, he chuckled and replied, “It’s more like two.”

“If you’ve got something worthy or worthwhile to do with your inheritance, you should probably do it. So that’s just a decision I made. And so be it.”

Alexander’s wasn’t the only open wallet. The Chawkers Foundation, a private charity group, gave the fledgling publication a $5 million kick-start under the terms of a five-year self-sufficiency deadline, making The Walrus one of the few privately-funded national magazines in Canada. Alexander explained why The Walrus took this course in an interview published on the magazine’s website.

“It was obvious,” he said, “that to sustain such a venture – where the magazine was part of a larger purpose – a fourth stream of revenue outside of advertising, newsstands and subscriptions would be necessary to help through the challenging start-up phase.”

Given the necessity for steady income under Chawkers’ terms, it was risky to go the paid circulation route (as opposed to a closed circulation). Alexander said it came down to accountability to the readers.

“One thing controlled circulation can lead to (is) a certain complacency and a certain laziness because, arguably, you have your distribution already . . . in our case we can take nothing for granted.”

So The Walrus, like its consumer counterparts, is fighting for its readers in the marketplace. For that reason, perhaps, advertisers were initially slow to get on board. Seeking an editorial/advertising split of 70/30 didn’t make things any easier for the startup, given that most consumer magazines are closer to 40/60.

But despite the unconventional approach, The Walrus had a good launch. Right from the beginning, subscriptions and circulation were above expectation, and the media made a lot of the unique Walrus mandate.

Then David Berlin quit and things got interesting.

Berlin was sick and the stress of the start-up was taking its toll. He would remain involved, writing articles and appearing on the masthead as a contributing editor, but was forced to step away from day-to-day operations. His replacement would be starting in the shadow of a man who had invested much towards improving the quality of journalism in Canada.

Enter Paul Wilson.

The gray-haired Wilson was a print veteran. He had edited the Review section of the National Post and been senior editor at Saturday Night magazine before becoming one of Berlin’s deputy editors. Even early on, however, he was skeptical of the publisher/editor relationship at the magazine.

“There’s a certain amount of chaos that attends any magazine launch,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “But this was chaos brought on by some people not knowing what they were doing. The lines of authority weren’t really clear in the beginning, and that made it pretty stressful.”

He witnessed Alexander, who was still just the publisher at that point, participating in editorial meetings. It was a precedent Wilson sought to break.

“Ken asked me to fill the job of editor and I took it on the condition that there would be a change in the way things were done, specifically that there be, as I put it, a separation between church and state.

“I didn’t want him to come to editorial meetings. I wanted him to judge my work on the basis of the issue as it appeared on newsstands.”

At first things proceeded as Wilson wanted, but Wilson said the agreement only lasted a month before the publisher began to “subtly” interfere more and more with the editorial process.

“He’d call me at seven o’clock in the morning and say that he thought the draft of an article that I’d edited was a piece of shit, and that he can’t possibly run it. And that’s my judgment call, not his judgment call, as editor.”

Alexander had further entangled himself with the editorial team through a complex financial arrangement. A publisher typically sets the budget for the editor to work with, but Wilson said he was never given control of his budget.

“The main problem was that all the contracts for the people working on the editorial side were contracts signed with Ken, not with me. I wanted that to change. I wanted to be in charge of the hiring and the firing of all the editorial staff.”

Writers were also paid from this phantom budget. Not knowing the size of his pocketbook made signing checks a worrisome task.

The relationship continued to degrade until Wilson drafted a contract that would formally clarify the publisher and editor’s roles and give Wilson the control he felt he needed.

“He sent me his version of the draft contract,” Wilson said, “which didn’t really look like a draft contract to me at all, but an ultimatum.” Conversations followed, board meetings, private discussions with writers and board members, and through it all, Wilson said, Alexander would not budge.

Exit Wilson stage left, five months after taking the job.

The media observed this second editorial changeover within a year and uncovered the tension that had been brewing inside The Walrus’ Duncan Street offices – not that Wilson held anything back.

“It was one of those situations where I felt that I wouldn’t beat around the bush and make him try to look good. I resigned. I hadn’t been fired and I had very specific reasons for it, which I wanted people to know about.”

Wilson did not go alone. Managing editor Gillian Burnett said she was “motivated” by Wilson’s resignation and agreed with his assessment of the internal structural problems.

This left a huge hole in the editorial team, one that Alexander was more than willing to fill himself.

Back at the bar, as we sat munching bread and sipping lager, I asked Alexander if he was looking to replace Wilson.

“No. I’m very much enjoying what I’m doing,” he replied before rattling off a list of writers he’s edited since the first issue. It includes Richard Ford, Marci Macdonald, Stephen Handleman and Tariq Ali.

“Is that intoxicating and a tremendous amount of fun? You bet it is.”

Appearing on the masthead as publisher/editorial director, Alexander now has control over both the business and editorial aspects of the magazine, and has used that control to take the magazine in a slightly different direction.

Starting with the September 2004 issue, the magazine shifted towards politics and current events, and away from the broader areas than normally fall into the category of “general interest.” Generally, the articles have also had a much stronger tone and stance.

“It’s critically important that we be engaged in the vital issues of the day,” he said. “A magazine can become observational to the point of becoming irrelevant.”

Was this at the root of your problems with Wilson, I asked.

“I didn’t think he was interested in making it provocative and engaging. It’s simply a different style. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just his style, in my view, wasn’t what we needed at that time.”

Would there ever be a time when Wilson’s ideas would be welcome?

“I’ll always welcome Paul’s ideas. I welcome everybody’s ideas. Absolutely. But he also believes that there should be a complete separation between publishing and editing. And not knowing what a publisher is, I couldn’t understand what I was separating from.”

It became clear over the course of our conversation that industry experience matters little to him.

“It could be that years and years of experience in the industry is a negative. If you bumped into someone who’s an expert in magazines in Canada, the corollary should be ‘just what has your expertise done for the industry?’”

“There is a tremendous amount of pretentious, almost foppish behavior and talk around magazines, as if there’s some sort of special knowledge. There isn’t. There’s guts and smarts and instinct.”

For Wilson’s part, he is uninterested in contributing to the magazine again. Alexander isn’t the only one who believes the mag’s new direction runs contrary to Wilson’s style.

“I don’t necessarily think that strong, opinionated pieces reflect the reality that’s out there,” Wilson said.

Alexander shows no signs of turning back now. He sees the older issues of The Walrus as being passive by comparison to the new, more proactive approach. The payoff has come in subscription renewals that have been “absolutely staggering since the fall,” which is when the Canadian Circulations Audit Board last assessed the publication’s circulation.

According to the CCAB, subscriptions and single copy sales totaled just over 37,000 in September 2004. This was a slight drop from its previous audit in March of the same year, when the circulation registered as just over 39,000.

Alexander says his readership currently sits at more than 50,000, though he acknowledges that there are no independently audited numbers to back him up. However, even if the numbers are closer to those put out by CCAB back in September, that’s still far better than initial projections for this point in time.

While Alexander says he’ll ultimately measure his success in the relationships he’ll build with readers, he cannot afford to ignore these numbers. Without an attractive readership to draw in advertisers, the magazine will have to rely more and more on non-traditional incomes to be self-sufficient when it steps out from under Chawkers’ umbrella. To that end, Alexander is attempting to get The Walrus Foundation, the magazine’s companion corporation, listed as a charitable group. This will, among other things, alter its tax status. The Canada Revenue Agency has turned him down once, but he has made a second appeal that is currently under review.

Alexander calls the media attention caused by the staff turnover “rubbish.” He’d rather the press focus on the publication itself.

“I think this is an extremely important endeavour that has nothing to do with the editor or the publisher. It has everything to do with the readers.”

The dedication he and his staff have to fostering smart, relevant dialogue among readers comes up time and again during our conversation. It’s clear he feels the readers have ownership over The Walrus, and it is to them that he makes himself accountable.

“If they stop responding I’ll let you know, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think there’s a real appetite for trying to figure out what the hell is going on out there.”

Photos by Christa Maitlan and Scott Jordan