A recent afternoon visit to the headquarters of Chatelaine in downtown Toronto found no crying, no gnashing of teeth, no bleats of rage from any of the 28 full-time staff working for Canada's longest-running and most successful women's magazine.
Apparently, if one is to believe the stories, such outbursts have not been uncommon in the last four years. Chatelaine, after all, has had four editors-in-chief in that time, and seen the departure of dozens of staffers and contributors. All of which has "pitched" the mood at the magazine "somewhere between anxious and neurotic," according to one much-read article on Chatelaine's woes in the February issue of Toronto Life.
But last week all seemed purposeful, calm and bright on the sprawling eighth-floor space Chatelaine shares with Flare and Glow and all the other magazines published out of Rogers Media's castle-like "campus" east of Yonge Street.
It's an atmosphere Maryam Sanati seems intent on keeping, nurturing, heightening, in fact. Last month she was named Chatelaine's editor-in-chief, the tenth to hold that position in the periodical's 80-year history. Indeed, she'll be the chatelaine of the ball that Chatelaine is holding Wednesday at the swelegant Windsor Arms Hotel to mark the onset of its octogenarianism.
The occasion also will see the unveiling of a radical redesign which has been in the works, in one way or another, for at least the last two years. The new look will dress the May issue which, at 364 pages, is the biggest single edition in Chatelaine history and, with a one-time-only cover price of $1.99, certainly its cheapest in years. (The cover price returns to $4.50 in June.)
Sanati, 38, Iranian-born, University of Toronto-educated, has been at Chatelaine since early fall 2006 when then-editor-in-chief Sara Angel appointed her as deputy editor. Previously, she'd worked in sundry editorial capacities at The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine, Shift and Toronto Life. At the time of Sanati's arrival, Angel herself had been in the editor's chair for only about five months, chosen after a nine-month search to succeed Kim Pittaway.
Named editor-in-chief in 2004, Pittaway had abruptly resigned after only 15 months in the job, saying she couldn't work with publisher Kerry Mitchell. Angel's term proved even shorter but more tumultuous: Announced as editor in May of 2006, she was gone by mid-July 2007.
At any other publication, such turmoil might have had a deleterious impact on its public reception. But no magazine survives for 80 consecutive years by being just "anything." And, in fact, Sanati has inherited a decidedly thriving enterprise. Last year it was the country's largest magazine by revenue (more than $53-million) and second in circulation (more than 550,000), with a an estimated per-issue readership of 3 to 4 million. So when Sanati notes that Chatelaine's new cover tagline will be "First for Canadian Women," it's not just a slogan or a boast, it's a fact.
Over the years, Sanati has earned a reputation for tact, diplomacy, discretion - and an ability to get things done, all of which were on ample display last week. Asked to interpret, "just generally," why Chatelaine has been described as "dysfunctional" and "unhappy" in the years before her ascension, she tacked sideways. "That sort of history seems so distant to me. It doesn't affect the reality or the way the place functions or the spirit that's here," she said. "I can only speak for myself and for me it's been a truly satisfying work place, very fruitful ... and quite intriguing, especially in seeing how Chatelaine fits into the lives of so many women."
For the last nine months Sanati has worked especially closely with Lise Ravary, Rogers' nominally Montreal-based editorial director of women's titles and new magazine brands. Ravary has been functioning as Chatelaine's "editorial director" ever since Sara Angel's leave-taking and will continue to hold that title on the magazine's masthead after Sanati goes on maternity leave in early June. (Sanati is expected to name her own deputy editor this week.)
"Magazines are hyper-collaborative," Sanati noted, and most observers agree the Ravary-Sanati collaboration has been an effective one. Indeed, Sanati now occupies what was Ravary's office - or perhaps still is: the two-deck sign by the door reads "Lise Ravary" on top and below, in elegant script, "Agent Provocateur."
The Ravary-Sanati regime has leaned heavily on celebrity covers (Chantal Kreviazuk, Alanis Morissette and Carrie-Anne Moss have been featured in recent months), and it's an inclination that will persist with the re-design. True, research has indicated Chatelaine readers are most interested in food, health, home, style, decor - what Sanati calls "the pillars" - but "I don't think concept covers are our thing," Sanati remarked. "There will be a people focus."
We've been told ad nauseam that we're living in a niche era, an epoch of specialization where, among other things, the general interest magazine is passé. Yet Chatelaine continues to prosper as an intelligent general interest magazine, albeit one aimed at the country's 10 million or so adult women. Asked why, Sanati theorized that it has something to do with "balance," with "tension. The magazine is made for women in the busiest time of their lives. It's about the struggle between home life and work life, community life and personal time, individual fulfilment and satisfying others."
And it's a fissure, so to speak, Chatelaine has been mining from its inception. Pulling out a copy of one of its earliest issues, when it sold for 10 cents and was called The Chatelaine (the "The" was dropped in 1931), Sanati pointed to an article titled "Only a Super Woman Can Juggle Both a Family and a Career." It had been commissioned by Anne Elizabeth Wilson, Chatelaine's first editor who lasted in the job for about a year, then, Sanati trenchantly noted, "left to get married."
Like every editor-in-chief, Sanati is fond of referencing "the typical reader" or, in her case, "the typical contemporary Canadian woman." Usually, this archetype is a fiction, a statistical composite distilled, as Sanati remarked, from "a deep amount of psychobiography, demography and market research." Chatelaine, however, draws heavily on a real woman.
This is Robin (her last name is a secret), a white, blonde, pretty working mother, in her late-30s, who lives with her husband and two children, on a combined family income of about $80,000, in a suburb north-east of Toronto. Virtually everything about Robin is available in Chatelaine's staff data base (and has been since at least early 2007). Rarely, Sanati remarked, does a day go by at Chatelaine headquarters without someone saying something like "Robin likes Patrick Dempsey" or "Robin would be interested in that" - and "that" could be a survey on the status of national day care, determining one's correct bra size or pinpointing "miracle foods that fight disease."
Robin functions as a sort of holy ghost for Chatelaine. "We don't bring her to sit in on story meetings or that sort of thing," Sanati said. "I've never contacted her in my life." But she is, as Auden said of Freud, "a climate of opinion" for the magazine, someone who "represents millions of women who are Chatelaine readers." Sanati pointed to a collage-like poster on her wall of pictures that Robin provided to the magazine, and images of things Robin likes. "That's her," she said. Her and pictures of her kids and her purse ("You'll see it's not a designer handbag") and her clothes closet and her refrigerator and the cover of The Da Vinci Code (a novel Robin has read) and, well ... you get the picture."Editors don't make decisions based on one person," Sanati stressed. "But [Robin]provides a really useful focus for us ... There's always research going on on the reader and you're not doing your job if you don't have a sense of that."