I was a little surprised to hear Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane's voice when I picked up my phone one afternoon back in the summer of 2003, mostly because we hadn't spoken in a few years. Mr. Macfarlane told me that he was devoting an upcoming column to his magazine's internship program - which I had talked him into starting a decade earlier - and he wanted to go over how it had all come about.
It was a pretty simple story: I was young writer looking to break into magazines; he was the editor of a very good city magazine with no job openings. So I decided to throw him a curveball: I said I would work as an unpaid intern that summer. After some arm-twisting - he wasn't sure that me working for free was fair - he agreed.
That decision has worked out well for both of us. I spent most of that summer researching a crime story that would make the cover of his magazine, get optioned for a film and launch a writing and editing career (I was six months into editing the now-defunct Canadian men's magazine Toro when he called me four years ago). Mr. Macfarlane would soon have one of this country's most revered and competitive magazine internship programs, with such talents as New York magazine editor-at-large Adam
Sternbergh, Report on Business magazine editor Gary Salewicz, and author Andrea Curtis among its alumni.
Of course, now that Mr. Macfarlane has announced his retirement (he will be replaced at the beginning of next year by senior editor Sarah Fulford), there is much else to praise about his 15-year tenure.
In December of 1992, the year Mr. Macfarlane began his second stint as editor at Toronto Life (the first was in 1972-73), he published a feature story by Toronto writer David Lees called The War Against Men, which, using a group called Metro Men Against Violence as its local hook, made the argument, with the aid of bona-fide statistics, that women initiated just about every form of domestic violence more often than men (but, admittedly, did far less damage than when it was the men getting ugly).
The fact that Mr. Macfarlane was willing to run what was obviously an incendiary piece of journalism, particularly in the dark shadow of the young women massacred in Montreal by Marc Lépine, was, as far as I was concerned, not only a sign of courage, but editorial brilliance.
At the time of the Lees story, Mr. Macfarlane was putting the finishing touches on a radical overhaul of the magazine - still the basic architecture of the magazine as it exists today. There were a lot more covers devoted to local personalities in the mid-nineties than the mostly service-oriented covers one sees today, such as "Ultimate Guide to Summer Fun," "The Next Hot Neighbourhoods," and "Best New Restaurants," to name a few. Readers grew to expect celebrities and controversial figures of all stripes and sizes, from Mike Myers (the magazine flew Michael Coren to L.A. for a side-splitting interview) to the Roots boys, to June Callwood, to Ontario's scandal-plagued former New York agent-general, Carlton Masters.
But if there is one Toronto figure Mr. Macfarlane will forever be tied to (in the journalistic sense), it will be Conrad Black. In fact, it's tempting to conclude that Mr. Macfarlane waited until he could publish the definitive magazine piece on Lord Black's fall, by Peter C. Newman, in the current issue, before announcing his retirement. Lord Black had fired Mr. Macfarlane as publisher when he bought Saturday Night magazine in 1987, and Mr. Macfarlane never forgot it. At least that's the way Lord Black likely sees it; Mr. Macfarlane claims Lord Black is simply a good story.
Unsurprisingly, there is a feature about the union of Lord Black and Barbara Amiel ("Can any marriage tolerate two such outsize personalities?") in Mr. Macfarlane's newly redesigned Toronto Life of January, 1993.
Lord Black landed on the cover six years later - only to be whacked by Michael Posner's imagined, multi-syllabic Pages from the Diary of Conrad Moffat Black - when he launched the National Post. In 2004, already in free fall, Lord Black slapped Toronto Life with a $2.1-million lawsuit for Robert Mason Lee's fairly tame satire, A Toast to Lord Black on His Arrival in Hell. The dispute was rather sensibly settled by a printed apology.
In my opinion, Mr. Macfarlane's Toronto Life enjoyed its best years, from an editorial perspective, in the latter half of the 1990s. Conrad was on the move. The police force was in disarray. Mike Harris was in power. (Harris's No Brainer cover treatment in June, 1996, may be the magazine's best ever, and the funny, creative profile that accompanied it, by David Macfarlane - no relation - was top drawer.) Toronto Life was then regularly publishing pieces that had - to use Mr. Macfarlane's preferred word - "buzz," including Wendy Dennis's memorable and award-winning Divorce From Hell (also from 1996), a moving and politically incorrect account of one Toronto man's epic marital woes.
It wasn't far into the new century that Toronto Life's parent company, Key Media, put the magazine, along with its other titles, up for sale. St. Joseph Media ended up with the winning bid in 2002, but the magazine seemed to lose some of its "buzz" during the transition. (Case in point: How is it that Toronto Life, arbiter of style and taste, took until November, 2005, to finally profile the city's mega indie band Broken Social Scene?) Obviously sensing that things needed to be shaken up and revamped, Mr. Macfarlane parted ways with his art director since 1992, Sandra Latini, two years after the purchase, and embarked on another redesign that many felt was inspired by one of his favourite city magazines - New York.
Despite any inevitable hiccups, Mr. Macfarlane is rightly being recognized as the editor whose magazine has won 53 gold medals at the National Magazine Awards over the past 15 years.
What he should also take credit for, especially during a time when so many magazines struggled, is turning Toronto Life into such a successful business (the industry publication Masthead estimates its revenue was $9.3-million last year).
Mr. Macfarlane also persistently extended the Toronto Life brand, from those ubiquitous little red city-guide booklets, to its restaurant endorsements, to its successful website, to its own television program on the short-lived Toronto One station. In fact, Toronto Life even had its own café beneath its old offices on Front Street for a number of years.
It sounds as though Mr. Macfarlane may be staying on in an advisory capacity with St. Joseph Media, but even if he doesn't, his legacy will continue, both in the formidable city magazine he has expanded and fortified and through all of those lucky interns who had the privilege to watch him work.