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Don't expect Saturday Night, Canada's oldest magazine, to play that Lazarus trick again. This time the venerable old rag, so beloved by readers, so ignored by advertisers, is well and truly dead.

The reason, say industry experts, is that a series of desperate publishers and editors squandered the franchise's name and loyal readership base. Projected losses ranged from $10-million to $12-million dollars for the magazine for this calendar year alone.

"Frankly," Maclean's publisher Paul Jones said in an interview this week, "when they [Conrad Black's Hollinger Corporation]said they were taking a magazine that was famous for losing money and they were going to quadruple its publishing frequency, we were stunned. We just couldn't believe our ears. And a year and a half later it is unsustainable."

The death notice came last week in a terse media release -- one media analyst called it "reptilian" -- from CanWest, the media conglomerate that acquired the National Post from Conrad Black's Hollinger Corporation in late August. Buried near the end of a two-page statement explaining that "decisive and swift" action was needed to "ensure the long-term viability of the newspaper" was the statement: "Saturday Night Magazine will no longer publish, however much of its material will be incorporated into the weekend editions."

Hollinger executives had tried to sell the magazine, which hasn't made money for the last 60 years, but nobody was interested. One potential buyer ran the numbers, considered "surgery of the most drastic kind" including reducing the publishing frequency to six times a year, and finally said, "no thanks."

A weekly publication can be very lucrative when things are going well and advertisers are rushing to market their wares. When things are going badly, and there is not a lot of advertising in next week's issue, you need circulation revenue to tide you over. Saturday Night didn't have any circulation revenue. In May last year, when the magazine was recreated as a weekend supplement to the National Post, its remaining subscribers, who numbered only about 70,000 souls, had their subscriptions switched from the magazine to the newspaper.

At the same time as circulation revenue disappeared, printing costs went ballistic because Saturday Night had to publish enough copies to insert in the weekend edition of the National Post. Besides all that, the magazine was competing with the Post for advertising dollars in a soft market in the midst of a newspaper war.

Many of the key people, including editor Dianna Symonds -- known as F.O.K. (Friends of Post editor Ken Whyte) -- are staying to work on the refashioned weekend edition of the Post, but the glory days when the magazine annually dominated the field at the National Magazine Awards are gone. "It is a dreadful shame that a publication that has been around for well over a century is gone," said Jones. "It was an all-or-nothing strategy when it ceased to have its own circulation list. Somebody asked me yesterday what is the good will inherent in the name Saturday Night, and my answer was you don't have any customers any more. It is just two words."

The magazine, which was launched in 1887 as Toronto Saturday Night under the editorship of E. E. Sheppard, was initially published as a tabloid. It went on sale at 6 p.m. on Saturday, a ploy enterprising publishers used back then to circumvent the religious and social prohibitions against commercial activity on Sundays.

By the 1920s, under editor Hector Charlesworth, still the scourge of the Group of Seven, the magazine took a much more critical look at Canadian economics and politics. Its great popular and critical success came under the next editor, B. K. Sandwell, who was at the helm from 1932 until the early 1950s. Sandwell used excellent writers, photographers and illustrators in a winning combination of profiles, issues and commentary and by the late 1930s, Saturday Night, as it was called by then, boasted the third-largest advertising lineage in North America.

After Sandwell the magazine went into a long decline, especially after real-estate and sports tycoon Jack Kent Cooke sold it in the late 1950s to Percy Bishop, a member of the Social Credit Party. After three issues it died for the first time and was resurrected by a group which included the family of the late Robertson Davies. Arnold Edinborough was the editor until 1968, when Robert Fulford succeeded him.

Under Fulford the magazine enjoyed critical, but not commercial, success. The magazine died again in 1974, ceasing publication for six months until another group of financial angels, organized by developer Murray Frum, rescued it once again. Five years later, one of Frum's angels, Norman Webster, whose family then owned The Globe and Mail, bought the magazine. Fulford continued as editor and John Macfarlane, now editor of Toronto Life, became the publisher. And so it continued for a decade until Conrad Black bought the magazine, Fulford resigned, and journalist John Fraser, now the Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, took over, trying to make it livelier, with a wider appeal. Ken Whyte, now National Post editor, succeeded Fraser, Paul Tough followed Whyte and finally Dianna Symonds, who had started working at Saturday Night as Fulford's assistant more than 20 years ago, took over the editorial reins when the magazine was folded into the newspaper.

Fulford is sad that the magazine has failed once again, but he refuses to bury the corpse. "Twice in my lifetime," he said in an interview this week, "it has been buried. Prayers were said over the body, hymns were sung." Fulford even remembers the "wonderful obituary" that was written in The Globe by former literary editor William French. "With its death, part of what it means to be Canadian died too," French wrote.

That epitaph still stands. Generations of writers, editors, photographers and illustrators got their start in Saturday Night. "I used to say that it was a failure if there wasn't a new writer in every issue," Fulford recalled.

Such magazines depend on young freelance talent willing to work long hours at pathetic rates of pay for the chance to have their voices heard and their work seen in a prestigious publication. Taking a magazine out of play, especially one that was almost a weekly -- SN never published more than 48 issues a year -- creates a serious hole for readers, workers and managers.

It drastically curtails the freelance market and makes it much more likely that talented people will leave the business. That is bad for the remaining magazines and for editors, writers, designers and sales reps who have fewer options to sell their work and hone their skills.

For people in the industry, the demise of a stellar publication like Saturday Night is like having your favourite squash partner leave the country. Who do you play against now? How do you improve your game?

On the surface, Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane should be gloating at the loss of his main competitor. Not so. Macfarlane is both saddened and angry at the demise of Saturday Night. He says the trouble began in the late 1980s when publisher Jeffrey Shearer and then-editor John Fraser transformed it from a monthly paid-circulation magazine to a controlled-circulation magazine distributed in newspapers in "the naive, but misguided belief" that if you simply added another 300,000 readers the advertisers would start booking space. "If the old model were still in place," he says, "it might have been possible to find another Murray Frum or Norman Webster or Conrad Black to step back in."

Having a national magazine that aimed high wasn't the problem, Macfarlane says, pointing out that Harpers and The Atlantic rarely make money in the United States and yet have managed to survive. If, he says, you took the money that was lost between the time they changed the model and changed it again -- a figure he estimates at $20-million -- and put it in an endowment fund, like the MacArthur family did with Harper's, then Saturday Night could have lived forever -- as Harper's does.

But Fraser says "the Macfarlane plan, which was to assume it couldn't make money, was pretty good and it conned money out of the Websters for about six or seven years and then it had its day. My plan conned money out of Hollinger for close to a decade and then it had its day, and the totally inserted magazine lasted a little more than a year."

To him, SN has had about 10 guises. "There is no continuum. We have a mystique that glides over some of the dark days, but there is no format or frequency or concept that hasn't been tried."

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