By Blair Mlotek and Viviane Fairbank

The front of book (FOB) consists of the first few pages of a magazine, with smaller pieces and graphics meant to ease a reader in before the long features. FOBs may have been relevant once, but today, when shorter articles and listicles are the majority of content found online, they don’t add value to a printed magazine. Leave FOB material for the website and longer features for the print edition, advises Drew Nelles, a freelance editor and writer now in New York, but formerly of Maisonneuve and The Walrus. Not everything is worth going to print anymore.

The solution to the “crisis of the front-of-book” may not be as drastic as cutting the section altogether (though some magazines, such as The Believer, have already taken that approach). Today, an FOB section simply has to be more singular than short, curated content. It has to have a theme or tone that is unique to a specific magazine, separate from the typical eclectic FOB style.

There’s The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, for example, which Nelles believes to have “a life and a voice” different from others. Or Harper’s Magazine, with its Harper’s Index and  Readings. Those sections are more than just padding before the crux of the magazine’s content; instead, they are part of the identities of the magazines.

But most other printed magazines, which haven’t been able to brand their FOB in the same way, may have to change their approach. Nelles says that Maisonneuve, which prints longer stories in its FOB section, was never able to determine what made something “right” for FOB, as opposed to the feature; it really only came down to page space.

Catherine McIntyre handles FOB for This Magazine. To her, the FOB section has value not only for light reading material before long, text-heavy articles, but also for establishing This’s identity. “If you’re picking up a magazine and you’re reading the front section, you know what to expect to a certain extent,” McIntyre says.

McIntyre doesn’t agree that these articles are similar to web content. In fact, for This, McIntyre tries to get stories that people may have missed online. They’re not always light stories and there isn’t always a clear theme, but there is a consistency that, McIntyre says, her readers rely on. She often publishes a profile, a news story that may have been missed in daily coverage, a critical account of a certain institution and a column on feminism in the FOB section.

McIntyre thinks that readers don’t mind if the content of a magazine is similar to what’s online. The words are the same in both places, but many people still choose to read in print form. She compares it to the same romanticism that brings people to the movie theatre, even though Netflix is just a laptop away.

The argument may be old, but it applies to the entire magazine industry, including the FOB. If The New Yorker cut its Talk of the Town, McIntyre says, readers would be “unimpressed.” They would be thrown off—many wouldn’t read the magazine at all. “And yet,” she says, “you can get Talk of the Town online.”

Tell us what you think in the comments below. Should magazines get rid of the front of book? 

 By Ronan O’Beirne

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes at the Review, and nobody has seen or done more than Lynn Cunningham. A widely respected editor before joining the faculty at Ryerson (she received, among other accolades, the National Magazine Awards’ lifetime achievement award in 1999), Lynn has been a mentor to countless writers and editors over the years. Having rid our pages of dozens of comma splices, Lynn is retiring at the end of the academic year, so we asked friends and alumni to pay tribute to her.

We hope she has more time to write now.

The Set-up

Definition: the premise of a pre-arranged outcome
A writer and an editor are lost in the desert. They’ve been without food or water for days, and it’s beginning to look like this is the end. Then, they see a shimmer on the horizon. They run toward it. It’s an oasis!

An editorial team is lost—or at least, wandering a bit in that editorial wilderness called brainstorming. It’s October 2008 and Cottage Life’s latest editorial package is in danger of being tinderbox-dry. Editor Penny Caldwell gathers her team of two editors and eight writers to sharpen ideas for the do-it-yourself package on how to be a cottage hero, slated for the June 2009 issue and set to feature more than 30 short service pieces. The last thing the team wants is a ho-hum execution. Enter David Zimmer, a frequent contributor and former editor, the guy readers love to hate for his brash and often-foolish style. Zimmer presents an idea to Caldwell about re-rooting a toppled tree—and how you can stash a dead body while you’re at it. Caldwell laughs. The idea is bizarre—not to mention morbid—but she is intrigued.

A few days later, Zimmer gets a call from his handling editor, Martin Zibauer. The story is a go. Several weeks and 159 words later, he delivers the expectedly absurd piece. To accompany it, the art department commissions a flight safety card-style illustration of a man dumping a limp body into a hole beneath an uprooted tree. The editors sell the package on the cover with a line that reads, “Hide a dead body.” Publisher Al Zikovitz gives the cover a once-over, not glancing twice at the cover line. He likes the controversial bit and gives Caldwell his approval.

The piece is a shift in tone from Cottage Life’s usual fare. Caldwell knows that. But she also knows it’s a fresh take on what might have been a dull how- to-save-a-tree piece. For the genteel editor, it’s a risk worth taking—a bit of absurd humour nestled snugly within a value-packed service roundup shouldn’t hurt anyone. In early May 2009, the issue goes to print and Caldwell thinks no more of it.

Being funny is something we Canadians are supposed to be good at. Think Jim Carrey, Dan Aykroyd, Stephen Leacock and a long list of homegrown and, yes, often-exported comedic talent. Still, not a lot of laughs find their way onto the pages of our magazines. Andrew Clark, a National Magazine Award (NMA) winner for humour and author of Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy, says our comedians have found success in radio, TV and film, but when it comes to print, the laughs are sparse because editors tend to “shy away” from humour. “I’ve never really been able to understand it,” Clark says. But humour isn’t easy (hence the theatre truism: dying is easy, comedy is hard). And while magazine editors often recognize its value as a leavener in what might otherwise feel like a heavy meal of service, profiles, features and investigative pieces, getting the menu just right takes skill—and some luck.

And last spring, Cottage Life wasn’t lucky.

The Act

Definition: an accompanying detailed description
The writer reaches it first and jumps into a lake of the cleanest, freshest, tastiest water he’s ever experienced. He gulps down the water and splashes around in it.

As Fielding discovered, crafting humour that hits the mark isn’t easy. Editors who take themselves too seriously are one problem. The typical editing process—circulating the draft widely so everyone can weigh in with suggested edits—is another. While that can work with straight features, with humour the comedic spark can get snuffed out along the way. “The whole thing’s been cleaned up, tightened,” says Fielding. “The language is beautiful and it’s dull.” Schatzker’s seen it happen to his own copy. As a satire writer for The Globe and Mail and frequent contributor to magazines including ROB and explore, he says most editors over-edit humour stories, almost to the point of “straight-jacketing” the jokes. One example: for a publication he won’t name, an editor assigned him an anecdotal piece, saying he wanted some quick-witted voice in the mix. But the editor then morphed Schatzker’s tone into what he felt was a more mundane voice, effeminate even. He didn’t see the changes until the piece appeared. Why did you come to me?  he thought. I’m funnier than you. What are you doing? He blames bad edits on editors’ dual impulses to avoid offence by softening the jab and avoid confusion by over-explaining the joke.

But the fact that Schatzker has steady humour gigs—like columnist Tabatha Southey at Elle Canada and Scott Feschuk at Maclean’s—makes his job easier than that of the untethered humour freelancer. A humorous piece is easier to pitch fully executed, rather than being boiled down to a query. For freelancers, the downside is the time and effort put into writing the piece literally doesn’t pay off if they can’t sell it. In August 2009, Anne Fenn, an nma winner for humour writing, wrote a piece poking fun at the trials and tribulations of sexless marriages. “The Joy of Scheduled Sex,” she called it. But actually selling it was agonizing. More passed because it had recently done a sex issue. Best Health had done something “similar” and Chatelaine wanted a humourless approach to the subject. In other words, a standard-issue feature. “I think the editors are afraid of offending their readers,” she says. “It’s sad.”

The situation is less dismal for humour columnists. Southey has been Elle’s funny gal for over six years and says changes to her columns are minimal and no topic is off-limits. Editor Rita Silvan hired Southey for her witty voice and gives her wide range. Why? “I’m dealing with a very talented writer who understands the brand.”

As a Maclean’s regular, Feschuk enjoys similar freedom, in part because boss Ken Whyte encourages his writers to use humour to provoke—not just in humour columns, but in serious pieces as well. Feschuk also produces a blog for macleans.ca where, in December 2008, he ignited controversy by adopting the character of the baby Jesus live-blogging from the manger. He didn’t hold back, ridiculing Christianity and the nativity scene. The piece prompted predictable outrage, with one insulted reader likening Feschuk’s hostility towards the religion to Joseph Stalin’s systematic starvation of the Ukrainians. Contentious or not, his editors were supportive—the piece attracted more attention than usual for the website.

Freelancers might envy the niches that Schatzker, Southey and Feschuk have carved for themselves, but other editors likely envy the magazines that have landed them. As any assigning editor will admit, humourists as skilled as this trio are few and far between. Since its 2007 launch, More’s monthly humour column has been the magazine’s trickiest slot to fill, says managing editor Sarah Moore. Rather than featuring the work of a single writer, she opens it to submissions from all of her contributors. And when her humour inbox is empty, she puts out a call to past contributors and brainstorms until the right topic pops up. Even then, it isn’t easy. “It’s really hard to go to somebody and say, ‘Write me a funny story,’” says Moore. “It’s easier for them to come to me and say, ‘I have a funny story that works for your magazine.’”

Moore’s frustration has a familiar ring for former Saturday Nighteditor Adam Sternbergh, now a well-regarded funny guy in his own right and an editor at New York magazine. Back in 1999, Saturday Night went through a redesign and added a humour section that mimicked The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs. It introduced The Passing Show section as a full page of laughs. “It just seemed natural that if you were presenting yourself as a national Canadian magazine,” says Sternbergh, “there should be some sort of element of humour in it.” But the staff struggled to find a tone that worked—and writers to deliver it. David Rakoff (who, like Sternbergh, is a Canadian working in the United States) kicked off the first column. The revamped section ran for only four issues before being spiked, and The Passing Show reverted back to its original “dryly reported tidbits.” Sixteen months in, that too was gone.

“The art of print humour is inarguably in a much weaker state now than it was 50 years ago,” says Sternbergh, adding the situation is similarsouth of the border, where it’s been more than a decade since Spy, the oft-mentioned model of modern satirical magazines, folded. Here in Canada, Frank’s Ottawa edition ceased publication two years ago (though the Atlantic version continues) and other mainstream magazines have reduced their already-limited humour content. In 2005, Chatelaine killed Judith Timson’s domestic humour column after 14 years. And Fashion axed Elizabeth Renzetti’s back-page column in 2004.

Clark accuses editors of a stereotypically Canadian crime: earnestness. “They don’t get that you could do a really serious article and use humour to make a point.”  Or maybe they just fear their readers will miss the point.

The Twist

Definition: an unforeseen development of events
Then he looks up. He sees the editor standing at the waterline. Instead of drinking the water, he’s pissing into it. “What the hell are you doing?” the writer cries.

Timing, as they say in comedy, is everything. And in Cottage Life’s case, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Just days before the issue arrived in mailboxes, police in Woodstock, Ontario, arrested two people in connection with the disappearance of eight-year-old Victoria Stafford. By the time readers started flipping through their June issues, a full-scale search was on to discover where the duo had dumped the girl’s body. Against that backdrop, some readers just couldn’t see the humour in a tongue-in-cheek reference to hiding a body.

And so, on June 2, 2009, Caldwell apologized on her blog for the “over-the-top bit of dark humour,” calling it an error in judgment. “I knew it was going to be slightly controversial, but it went further than I had anticipated,” she now says. “It was just one small story in the overall package.”

Even in the absence of such an unfortunate coincidence, readers’ reactions can be hard to predict. What’s snort-out-your-milk funny to one reader could be completely distasteful to another—but Clark argues if it isn’t offensive to someone, then it probably isn’t amusing to anyone. Back in 1996, Cottage Life came out with an illustrated cover by Canadian artist Joseph Salina of a naked woman cannonballing into the lake. A very slight tip of the butt crack was visible—an amusing, but hardly erotic, look at skinny-dipping by moonlight. Nonetheless, the magazine received a slew of letters from disgusted readers. But there were those who loved it—a Catholic minister wrote, “For God’s sake people, get a life. This is as funny as can be.” The problem is that anger tends to fuel more responses than agreement does. Still, publisher Zikovitz didn’t mind that controversy and doesn’t blame his editor for the most recent one either. “God forbid we ever publish magazines with no humour,” he says. While he regrets the timing of the dead body piece, he says it got people talking about the magazine. And that’s a good thing, even if some of that talk is unhappy.

Still, since most Canadian mass-market magazines need to attract a diverse audience to survive, it’s more challenging than ever to come up with humour that isn’t offensive to at least some readers.

That’s something that explore editor James Little discovered late last year when his magazine’s satirical piece on the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to let women enter the 2010 ski jumping competition landed with a thud. Many readers missed the joke, with at least five angry e-mails (mostly from female readers) crying sexism over a piece that joked about how dull it is to see fully clothed female athletes in any sport. Of course, that’s not what Little intended and he later had to spell out the joke on his blog, though unlike Caldwell, he refused to apologize despite threats from ready-to-unsubscribe readers. For a magazine that relies on paid subscriptions, it’s an uncomfortable position to be in.

But for publications that also rely on controlled-circulation like the now-defunct print edition of Toro, that worry, at least, is less of an issue. If a humour piece pissed off a reader, it didn’t really matter—the magazine still landed on the reader’s coffee table, or at least on their front porch, wrapped up in their Globe. According to former editor Derek Finkle, that liberation was one reason the magazine was able to experiment with more irreverence than most (although Toro still butted heads with the Globe occasionally). That, and the fact that the magazine was owned by an individual, rather than a risk-averse corporate entity, such as a printer or wireless company. Finkle’s unabashed gusto for impolite humour didn’t hurt either.

But those are conditions few magazines can match today. And with concern about shrinking audiences and book sizes in today’s advertising-challenged environment, risky humour content is often among the first to be cut: Due to space, Outdoor Canada pulled its annual Misdeeds & More roundup of bizarre news in outdoor life. The section had garnered attention in the past—the last iteration featured angler Mariko Izumi, wearing a t-shirt and bikini bottoms, sparking some readers to call it soft-core porn. And The Walrus, a frequent nmahumour winner, cut its essay-style humour features in 2008, with editor John Macfarlane saying he “just hasn’t felt the need for them.”

The Punchline

Definition: the culmination of a joke
“It’s okay,” replies the editor. “I’m making it better.”

While the audience reaction seemed gloom-and-doom at the Cottage Life office, Zimmer was uniquely placed to catch a glimpse of the opposite response. If it were up to him, he probably wouldn’t have issued that apology. He isn’t afraid to test his editors with outrageous ideas and foul language in his writing (though he didn’t get away with using “sucking face” in a story, a disappointing defeat). But like Southey and Feschuk, Zimmer has established himself as a reliable contributor over many years, giving him leeway to add that little bit of absurdity to his stories. “You’ll always get a handful of people who are shocked and appalled,” he says. “But that’s better than being ignored.” It takes trust, and Zimmer is confident that a reasonable reader would take his how-to piece as nothing but a tongue-in-cheek story. Besides, who’s got a dead body lying around?

The Payoff

Definition: the response, e.g. laughter, smirks, snorts, etc.
Insert your response here:

Not so shocking, either, is the biggest challenge editors have to face: accepting that there is no such thing as a guaranteed laugh. But a magazine that doesn’t even try? As Clark puts it: “Offend nobody, bore everyone.”

Prue Hemelrijk sits at her desk on her first day at The Canadian, a national general interest magazine. She’s unsure what’s in store for her as editor Harry Bruce, carrying a manuscript, makes his way toward her. He sets it on her desk and says, “We need to do something called fact-checking. Do you know what that is?”

She has no idea.

“I think they check the facts,” says Bruce.

Hemelrijk takes the manuscript and starts going through it line-by-line, underlining everything that looks like a fact. Then, in the margins, she notes where she thinks the information came from in her neat, economical writing and starts making calls.

Soon she is a pro, catching errors and sparring with writers over corrections. Earl McRae is in his office at the magazine when Hemelrijk comes to see him about a profile he wrote on a retired athlete. She has his manuscript in her hand and he can see all sorts of scribblings in the margin. “Oh God,” he thinks. “What the hell?”

“Earl, he says his stomach is not fat,” Hemelrijk says. “When he sits down it appears fat, but when he stands and is walking, his stomach is not fat.”

“Yes, he has a fat stomach. I was there; I saw him.”

“He says that when he stands his stomach is not fat,” she responds patiently. “It was just the way he was sitting.”

That tenacity, which McRae can now laugh about, helped Hemelrijk earn the respect of Canada’s top journalists and become the first-ever winner of a National Magazine Award (NMA) for Outstanding Achievement in 1990.

The practice of checking is straightforward: Researchers go through a story and identify every fact. They then conduct interviews with sources, examine documents and do whatever else is necessary to confirm everything in the piece. “I think fact-checking’s terribly important,” says Hemelrijk. “It drives me crazy when I read things and they are not accurate. I think, ‘That is not right. Why didn’t they take the trouble to find out?’”

But after setting the standard for rigorous fact-checking, she said goodbye to the craft 13 years ago. Since then, the magazine industry has gradually followed, jeopardizing the accuracy that gives long-form journalism its credibility.

* * *

Hemelrijk was born in Liverpool, England in 1927 to a wealthy family in the cotton business. Nannies cared for her and her siblings in their childhood home, which had a separate nursery wing. But in 1932, her family lost its fortune after the cotton market crashed and she lived hand-to-mouth for the next several years. Eventually, the family got back on its feet and she was able to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. At 28, she began working for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Close to the Arts Council were a number of shipping company offices, and she would often pass by at lunchtime, wondering what it would be like to take a trip by sea. So in 1956, at the age of 29, Hemelrijk quit her job and boarded an ocean liner headed for Canada. She landed in Montreal and made her way to Toronto where, through connections, she got a job as an editorial assistant at Maclean’s. She moved to Chatelaine a year later. In 1959, she returned to England, but five-and-a-half years and a broken engagement later, she settled back in Toronto. In 1966, she started working at The Canadian. Distributed on Saturdays in 13 newspapers across the country, it had a circulation of nearly two million.

Bruce, who hired Hemelrijk, remembers being struck by her intelligence and proper manners. Then, when she started fact-checking, he was impressed with her knack for isolating what needed to be verified. “Some checkers would be so literal that they were kind of missing the point. For instance, a writer might make an extreme exaggeration as a joke. A checker might think that was a mistake. But not Prue,” says Bruce. “She was not just smart—she was smart enough that you could trust her absolutely.” David Cobb, a managing editor at The Canadian, recalls her strong will. “When she got in her head that something was wrong, you better change it or accept the fact that she was going to change it instead.” Hemelrijk attributes this to “a terrible eye for detail” and admits, “Anything that looks even slightly shady I say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here,’ and sit with it until I get it. It’s the kind of silly thing I excelled at.”

Hemelrijk may call it silly now, but there was a time when that skill was highly sought after. Time first introduced fact-checking after it was founded in 1923. The New Yorker did the same in 1927 after mistakes began appearing in its pages. A profile of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, incorrectly stated her father’s profession (he was a school teacher, not a stevedore) and said her mother’s memory was weak. Millay’s mother wrote a letter chastising the publication for not verifying the information and listing other inaccuracies in the piece. After this embarrassment, The New Yorker famously built one of the most scrupulous fact-checking departments in the magazine industry—a department for which Hemelrijk says she aspired to work.

Initially, editors and publishers saw checking as work suitable for intelligent women—but not men—and didn’t consider it as important as writing or editing. Time’s fact-checkers were bright, young females from well-respected families who had graduated from the right schools. Over time, this “women’s work” became a staple at magazines throughout Canada and the United States.

Not everyone welcomed that. Some writers, including McRae, saw checking as a nuisance. Although fond of Hemelrijk, he’d sneak into the copy department’s offices at The Canadian to see what notes the checker had made on his manuscript. “I felt that fact-checkers could sometimes be a little too precise, a little too anal. If you’re writing, you’re being creative at times,” he says. Now a columnist for the Ottawa Sun, McRae admits the practice can come in handy with details such as the spellings of names and places, but believes the writer’s research and observations need to be trusted. He doesn’t think it’s fair to always take the source’s word over the writer’s after a fact-checking call.

But even the best journalists can be fooled. When Paul Grescoe, a writer for The Canadian, submitted his story about a 70-year-old running superstar, he had no reason to think anything was amiss. He’d been in the man’s home, had seen all his trophies and had spent ample time interviewing him. After all this, Grescoe and his editors were stunned when letters started rolling in from the organizations that ran the events the man claimed to have won. As it turned out, they had never heard of him—he made it all up. Editor Dennis Harvey, who didn’t believe in fact-checking, had earlier reassigned the magazine’s checkers to new duties. If only checkers had called the race organizers to confirm the man’s story—a relatively quick process—the magazine could have avoided embarrassment. When Harvey moved on, his successor, Michael Hanlon, reinstated them.

Hemelrijk stayed at The Canadian until 1977. She then left for The City, where she first met writer D.B. Scott. “Prue was a kind and courtly person, but she was relentless,” he recalls. “The conversation would start, ‘Oh, good morning, sir. I have a few teeny, tiny questions,’ and 40 minutes later you were still on the phone with the blood running out of your ears because she had so carefully taken the story apart.” Hemelrijk enjoyed deconstructing each story, fact by fact. “If you were feeling vindictive against somebody and they got something wrong you’d think, ‘Ha! Got ’em!’”

When The City, which was owned by Torstar, folded in 1980, Hemelrijk and the rest of the staff interviewed for other positions within the company’s empire. One after another, they returned from the interviews with bad news. Then it was Hemelrijk’s turn. While she was waiting, one of the bosses saw her and said, “Oh hi, Prue. You surely didn’t think we were going to let you go, did you?”

But she lasted just four months as copy editor for Starweek, a TV magazine, before she got fed up with the pointless gossip. When she told the editor she was quitting, he said, “I’m surprised you lasted this long.”

Hemelrijk went freelance in May 1980, working for the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Saturday Night, enRoute,Canadian Art and Financial Post Magazine. Later, it was during her stint at the short-lived Vista, a flashy business magazine, that she made her most memorable mistake: The cover line on an issue with a Hong Kong package read “Hong Hong.”  No one caught the error in editorial and it got all the way to the art department. She made photocopies and stuck them on the walls of the copy department as a cruel reminder to herself and her colleagues.

* * *

After 32 years of checking the facts, Hemelrijk retired in 1997 at the age of 70. Her departure coincided with a shift away from a commitment to meticulous fact-checking in the Canadian magazine industry. When Ken Whyte became editor of the now-defunct Saturday Night in 1994, he slashed the in-house fact-checking department in half and relied on freelancers to pick up the slack. Three years later, Canadian Businessswitched from a monthly to a twice-monthly production schedule and introduced a lighter checking system to keep up with the increased frequency. Editors flagged what they felt needed to be checked; everything else went virtually unchecked. After a few weeks, the magazine reverted back to its full checking policy. ButMaclean’s made similar cuts to its fact-checking department when Whyte became editor and publisher in 2005. Now that he’s publisher of CB, that magazine, too, has slashed its fact-checking department. Managing editor Conan Tobias says the cuts were to save costs; Whyte did not return calls seeking comment. CB now only checks pieces written by freelance writers or particularly contentious or number-heavy stories. Staff writers are expected to be extra diligent in their reporting and to check their own work. “We’re no less committed to accuracy, but the writer is more responsible for it now,” says Tobias. “Writers make mistakes and checkers make mistakes too. It’s never going to be 100 percent accurate, no matter what you do. No publication is 100 percent accurate.”

Pat Ireland was one of the checkers let go in the most recent CB restructuring. A checker for over 25 years and with the magazine for 20, she feels the cuts will be detrimental to the publication. “It makes a lot more sense to check [business magazines] because the people who read them know what you’re talking about. If you get numbers wrong, if you get something foolish wrong, it just stands out.” It also erodes reader confidence—a huge setback for any magazine.

Another blow to the tradition has been an increasing reliance on interns. Some magazines, includingChatelaine and Toronto Life, use interns who are trained and closely monitored. Both have staff checkers who vet their work and handle challenging pieces. Linda Besner didn’t know what fact-checking was when she started interning at The Walrus in 2008, but she had to learn fast: She started checking everything from sidebars to major features after receiving a tutorial from managing editor Jared Bland on her first day. AtMore magazine, copy editor Brenda Thompson oversees interns. She starts them off with back-of-book pieces or shorter features and they work their way up to more complex stories.

The reliance on unpaid or under-trained staff can be detrimental to a magazine’s credibility, says Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. “It defies logic to say that eliminating an entire phase of quality control will not degrade the quality of your work,” he says, adding that fact-checking is an integral part of the journalistic process, just as reporting and editing are. He thinks employing people with little or no experience is not ideal. “It makes an organization feel like it’s doing some checking. When it comes to what is worth investing in, fact-checking is absolutely seen as second class.”

More than credibility is at stake. Brian MacLeod Rogers, a lawyer who specializes in media law and litigation, says fact-checking is often one of the few tools a magazine has to protect itself in libel suits. Under a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling, a publication can protect itself by proving it took thorough measures to ensure the accuracy of a piece. And magazines that do light checks or rely on interns diminish the protection fact-checking provides. Rogers says interns don’t make the best witnesses in libel cases and an experienced and respected fact-checker has more authority. Although only a fraction of defamation suits in Canada actually make it to trial, mistakes can still have serious legal and financial repercussions for a publication.

* * *

When it came time to choose a winner for the inaugural NMA for Outstanding Achievement, there was no question in the judges’ minds the winner should be Hemelrijk. David Olive, now a columnist with the Star, was president of the NMAs in 1990 and wanted to honour someone who rarely enjoyed the limelight. Don Obe, an editor at The Canadian in the 1970s, says, “She got the award not only for her own accomplishments, but for what she represented, working in the trenches.”

The award came as a shock to Hemelrijk. When Olive called to deliver the news, he first asked, “Are you sitting down?” Her immediate response was, “The committee must’ve been drunk.”

A week before the NMA banquet in 1990, Hemelrijk fell on a slippery road, tipsy from a late-night dinner with photographer Bert Bell on the day Vista folded. The accident left her with a bad hip injury. Although her colleagues wanted to carry her to the awards, the doctors would not have it, so Barbara Sutton, managing editor of City & Country Home at the time, read her speech: “I’d like to share the award with all those other equally dedicated and devoted, accurate and precise, tenacious and tactful, punctilious and perfect—are we running out of adjectives?—copy editors, proofreaders and fact-checkers across the country who have toiled, are still toiling and will continue to toil in the background at what some might regard as a thankless job.”

Hemelrijk moved to Victoria in 1998, relocating for the better weather conditions and what she considered an agreeable cost of living. The 83-year-old is cheerful as ever, with her proper British accent and collegial nature. She spends her days practising the cello (which she took up at age 79), playing in a small orchestra and socializing with her friends from the Victoria Women’s Newcomers Club. This winter she had a marathon celebration for her birthday that lasted several days. (And, every year, she throws her beloved Paddington Bear doll its own birthday party. The parties are sometimes catered with fine food, lots of wine and, of course, a birthday cake. Hemelrijk says her 36-year-old Paddington is a big part of her life. She bought it in 1974 and had it customized to her specifications—blue hat and coat, and size four children’s boots.)

She no longer does any fact-checking or copy editing. “When I moved to Victoria, I thought, that’s it. Goodbye.” And goodbye it was. A self-professed workhorse, Hemelrijk started checking by chance and continued because editors recognized her skill. She also got an undeniable thrill from the chase. “I found it rather fun. It was like detective work.” She believes that accuracy is vital to the magazine industry.

“People read things and they think it’s gospel truth,” she says, “and if it isn’t gospel truth then it’s sad.”

A nun who tended to her in the rehabilitation centre after her hip injury called her an independent perfectionist. “That’s me,” says Hemelrijk. “If I ever have a grave, I’d put that on my grave.” (The facts are, though: She wants to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the sea.)

Sitting in the boardroom of the cramped, paper-strewn Geist offices, tucked in the middle of the trendy art galleries, upscale glassware shops and condo developments of Homer Street, Osborne shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He’s in no mood to talk. He declines to have his voice committed to audiotape during our interview, and won’t even allow the door to be closed due to his claustrophobia. “There are no secrets here,” he says, a trace of paranoia in his voice.

Despite his tics, Osborne is something of a local celebrity, a charismatic bon vivant in the B.C. literary community, inspiring awe and devotion in what could (and have been) described as “groupies.” The 55-year-old Osborne is also a computer genius, a devoted grandfather and a man whose shyness led him to begin publishing his photography in the pages of Geist under the enigmatic pseudonym Mandelbrot (after the inventor of chaos theory).

Adamant that Geist is unparalleled among Canadian magazines, Osborne clearly loves to talk about his baby. “I think we have the highest editorial control in the country,” he boasts, his voice veritably purring. “We edit word by word. We fact check the fiction.” Not exactly the kind of casual congeniality you’d expect from a magazine with a steaming mug of coffee for a logo. Osborne has been called business-savvy, ambitious, philanthropic, irreverent and an opinionated idea man. Above all, he is viewed in the insular world of Canadian magazine publishing as having what former Saturday Night editor Paul Tough calls an “outsider personality.” And being an outsider suits Osborne just fine. After all, it usually takes one to lead a revolution, cultural or otherwise.

Okay, it may be a tad hyperbolic to equate a literary magazine with a revolution, but if any Canadian magazine out there is working to shake up a stagnant publishing industry, it’s Geist. People who know Osborne are quick to point out that father and brainchild are indistinguishable, one and the same in tone and worldview. While the quarterly Geist is currently the largest literary magazine in Canada, its circulation still hovers around 7,000 an issue, and it operates on a shoestring $180,000 annual budget. Compare that with the two biggest moneymakers in Canadian magazine publishing, the Rogers-owned Chatelaine and Maclean’s, with a combined total revenue for 2002 of over $80 million.

According to a 2000 study Osborne completed for the Canada Council, the average total circulation for a Canadian English-language literary, visual arts or performing arts magazine is a mere 1,817. Most pin their financial prospects on government money, but since Canada Council grants only account for an average of 23 per cent of total revenue, and provincial grants 13 per cent, these magazines rely heavily on advertising and subscribers to make up the difference. With a dusty back-shelf presence and less than one-tenth of the marketing budget of a magazine with a circulation of 100,000, it can be almost impossible for a small-circulation magazine to find an audience. What’s a self-respecting independent publisher to do? Fill the void.

While most Canadian cultural magazines are (or are perceived as) stuffy, eggheaded publications content to stay on those back shelves and blend in with magazines that read like university dissertations and have the visual panache to match, a handful have come up with fresh approaches to documenting Canadian cultural life. Magazines like HighGrader, a northern Ontario public affairs magazine, and Lola, a Toronto-based arts journal, are doing their parts to subvert readers’ negative expectations. On top of this list of innovators isGeist. Osborne not only wants to “document the Canadian imagination,” his goal for Geist is to become the definitive Canadian magazine. If its burgeoning reputation in the national literary community is any indication, he just might get his wish.

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“Politics is open and discussed in Canada. Unlike in the U.S., there are alternative venues of thought,” Osborne says. “What’s hidden in Canada is culture.” For over a decade, he had seriously entertained the idea of creating a magazine modelled after the venerable U.S. publication Harper’s?and to a lesser extent The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly?and adapting it to suit a Canadian audience. With $7,500 and encouragement from his long-time life partner and senior editor Mary Schendlinger, Osborne created the first issue in his living room in the fall of 1990.

Today, Geist (German for “ghost” or “spirit”) is published by the Geist Foundation, a nonprofit board with Osborne acting as sovereign lord and master. The magazine shares office space with Vancouver Desktop Publishing (founded by Osborne in the 1980s and currently run by his sister Patty), Arsenal Pulp Press (an alternative book publishing firm Osborne started in the 1970s) and an arts management agency (he had nothing to do with this one).

Over the last 12 years, Osborne has managed to transform Geist from a roughly designed magazine?published on what looked like that pulp paper fourth-grade teachers hand out with the fat pencils?to an elegant publication full of luxurious white space, thick-stocked, silky pages, clean lines and stunning black-and-white photography.

But the spirit of the content has changed little. Each issue is devoted to intensely personal, nostalgic and evocative nonfiction and fiction. The front section of the magazine, Notes and Dispatches, always includes a brief essay by Osborne. (In last fall’s “The Lost Art of Waving,” he wondered, “Who today is willing to be diagnosed as nostalgic? Who confesses to that once noble affliction, now reduced to a mere attribute of sentimentalism, a component of kitsch?”) Schendlinger contributes regular cartoons under the pseudonym Eve Corbel. (“Hi, I’m Eve Corbel?and I am Intermittently Unnoticeable. No, really.”) Recently, Geist has received national media attention for its campaign to induct folk legend Stan Rogers into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The magazine is often funny and irreverent, but are its ideology and outlook a little too, well, West Coast (read “flaky”) to appeal to a national audience?

“They say ideology is like halitosis, everyone else has it, right?” jokes Melissa Edwards, Geist‘s assistant editor. Her responsibilities include editing the magazine’s back page, “Caught Mapping.” (Each issue features a different theme map of Canada, like summer 2000’s “Menstrual Map,” which included the real locations Bloody River, Gush Cove and Bitch Lake.) She also does the day-to-day “monkey work” of the operation. “You don’t see your own ideology,” she says. “To me Geist is not a western magazine.” Edwards comparesGeist‘s situation to The Globe and Mail. “People from Toronto say that it’s not a Toronto newspaper, it’s national. I read it and it’s like, ‘It’s a Toronto newspaper.’ You can’t help be focused on where you’re from.”

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“Please cancel all future editions of Geist magazine. I dislike the writings printed?Mad to me, and they have a ridiculous, non-sensible, no-talent style. I’ve reread the magazine (or tried to), attempted to understand the prose, poetry (no rhyme), and articles that fill up (with small print) this unique, non-talent (so it seems to me), rambling in the clouds, magazine.”

Like this anonymous former subscriber (sounds as if he or she needs new reading glasses), many readers in the West don’t have any love for a “rambling in the clouds” literary journal either. “A lot of people find it really boring,” says Edwards, who was so enraptured by Geist she started out as a volunteer. A project manager with the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, Edwards started marketing campaigns in little British Columbia towns, only to discover that many of those remote outlets not stocking Geist were downright confused by it.

“A lot of them said, ‘This is a magazine? It doesn’t look like a magazine,'” she recalls. Apparently, light and glossy plays as well in Dawson Creek as it does in Stoney Creek. While Edwards thinks a Toronto-based magazine will eventually come along to try to take the place the faltering Saturday Night used to occupy in the cultural lexicon, she still thinks Geist is on “the cusp of being something really big.” Osborne certainly has no plans to relocate, especially since he considers Toronto such an “intellectual wasteland.” He says his obligation is to the Canadian Small Town?whether or not it’s receptive to him?and mourns its loss as an idea both in the Canadian media and in the collective Canadian imagination.

“If you hit a neutron bomb south of Bloor Street, you’d take out 95 per cent of Canada’s media,” HighGradereditor Charlie Angus says, echoing Osborne’s refrain. “They all come from the same gene pool, and they all end up basically telling the same views.” Like Geist, Angus’s magazine seeks to document the small-town Canadian imagination, but in a more self-consciously regional sense. Since 1995, HighGrader has provided a cultural voice for northern Canadians, written from a northern perspective. “Rural Canada is an internal Third World,” Angus says. “People’s stories are just written off, or they’re from an urban perspective, which diminishes the northern voice.”

Published bimonthly from the small mining town of Cobalt, Ontario, HighGrader bills itself as “a magazine with dirt on its fingernails.” Neither Angus nor his wife, publisher Brit Griffin, has any formal journalistic training, but both share a deep commitment to fighting social injustice, and their magazine generally reflects their pro-labour and anti-Tory views.

HighGrader straddles the line between serious political reportage and a folksy voice that articulates the culture of the north. The Fall 2002 issue, for instance, includes pieces on diverse topics like “The Kam Kotia Mine Disaster” (“Ontario’s most notorious mine waste problem”), to Jim Moodie’s nostalgic pilgrimage to Bob Dylan’s boyhood hometown, Hibbing, Minnesota, which would be right at home in the pages of Geist.HighGrader‘s scope is not limited entirely by geography, either. “We try to put an international perspective on rural hinterland issues,” Angus insists. He says his magazine doesn’t reflect a particular party line; Angus himself is almost as suspicious of urban warriors like Earthroots as he is of the Tory government.

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“Our magazine is being kept alive by old people,” Angus says with a chuckle. Some faithful subscribers are even in their 90s. While the magazine’s circulation is only about 2,000, a recent reader profile estimated its actual readership as high as 12,000. Angus claims the real boon is HighGrader‘s unusually high subscription renewal rates (although he has no firm numbers). With an almost nonexistent newsstand profile and frustrating experiences with past distributors?including one that never paid and refused to reveal where the magazine was stocked?HighGrader relies on its subscribers to keep it alive, a unique situation, considering subscription sales account for only 17 per cent of the average small-circulation magazine’s revenue.

Still, it’s not an unusual phenomenon for a small Canadian title to have such a rabidly loyal following. According to John Degen of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association, Canadian magazines have become world leaders in per-capita subscription sales. “Canadian consumers are wily,” Degen says. “When they don’t see themselves reflected at the supermarket checkouts or newsstands, they make sure their perspective gets delivered to their door instead.”

Like Osborne and Schendlinger, Angus and Griffin pride themselves on their high level of editorial control. Unlike Geist, however, HighGrader has stayed away from grant funding. About two-thirds of Geist‘s budget comes from public funding, mainly from the Canada Council and the Canada Magazine Fund, which was launched in 2000 by Canadian Heritage.

For the 2000-02 funding period, the Geist Foundation received $40,000 from CMF for a direct mail campaign. But the CMF is by no means exclusively funding struggling independents. The program also gave the French and English versions of Chatelaine, the richest title in the country, over $500,000 combined for 2001-02. Sibling Maclean’s received over $1 million.

While the HighGrader team has discussed starting a foundation in the past, generally when money is tight, they make a plea to their readers. HighGrader subscribers have saved the magazine with their donations many times. For the past two years, Angus hasn’t had to make that plea, although subscription rates are going up at the request of many readers. “They think it’s way too low,” Angus says. “Twenty bucks a year, you just can’t make it.” He recently had to take a full-time job with the Algonquin Nation to support the magazine and his family (Angus has three daughters, aged 14, 12 and 5. The two eldest are already writers and activists).

Since HighGrader is such an eccentric magazine, Angus has basically given up on advertising revenue as a major source of income. “I can’t stand having to phone people time and time again for chintzy little ads,” he grumbles. Clearly, Angus is happier muckraking than marketing. But some fledgling cultural magazines are toying with the potential of big publicity, bigger circulation and (just maybe) big-time profits.

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“Who the fuck is Sharon Salson?” the press release demands. Salson sits cross-legged in a space-age desk chair in a downtown Toronto office building with a rather tony King Street address, wearing a casual uniform of jeans and a black cardigan, her blond-streaked hair stylishly tousled. Tucked in a small, bright corner of the cavernous, loft-style offices of Inside Entertainment publishers Kontent?an industrial space laden with wood blonder than she is and an assortment of candy-coloured iMacs and fuzzy-topped pens?Salson (who became Salson-Gregg after marrying pollster and former Conservative Party strategist Allan Gregg last August) is beaming with an air of enthusiasm that only someone with a marketing background can possess. She is, in fact, none other than the brand spanking new publisher of the country’s cheekiest, scrappiest and most irreverent art magazine, Lola, and she couldn’t be happier about it.

In February 2002, when Lola announced via brassy press release that it had acquired its first-ever publisher, the magazine was already a comparatively big success on the Toronto indie scene. But Salson-Gregg knew when she took the position it might be a struggle to transform Lola from underground darling to heavyweight commercial success. “It was an entrepreneurial challenge, a creative challenge,” she says. “It was a magazine that I had been following. I do believe strongly that it’s got tremendous potential in this market to really break through.”

Salson-Gregg came to Lola after marketing stints at Toronto Life and Telemedia and as marketing director at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (She still runs her own consulting business on the side.) After joining Lola last winter (and throwing a high-profile party in honour of her new gig), Salson-Gregg set out to build a growth strategy for the magazine. She is looking to expand Lola’s readership beyond its current niche of art insiders to readers who are interested in learning more about the art world but might be too intimidated to pick up a conventional art journal.
Founded in 1997 by editor and arts writer Catherine Osborne (no relation to Geist‘s Stephen), artist Sally McKay and curator John Massier, Lola quickly separated itself from the milky quagmire of stuffy academic journals like so much creamy goodness. From an initial print-run of 1,300 freebies distributed to art galleries and bookstores in downtown Toronto, Lola has grown to a circulation of 10,000.

The ladies of Lola were frustrated with the lack of freshness and innovation in the world of arts and culture coverage. “We were tired of reading the same bylines,” says Osborne, an impossibly petite brunette sporting groovy cat’s-eye glasses. “We were tired of the same artists getting coverage.” Osborne was also bored with the sterilized approach most art magazines took to rough and ready exhibits, robbing them of their vitality and “street cred.” Equally frustrated that she couldn’t score much freelance work in a stagnant Toronto arts journalism scene, Osborne met with McKay and mutual friend Massier, and decided to start a magazine (Massier left after two issues because of work obligations).

“When we started it was very much with that kind of do-it-yourself, “we’re-just-gonna-make-this-thing’ attitude,” says McKay, sitting in the front room of her tiny second-floor apartment in west end Toronto. “It quickly became clear that there was a place for a serious endeavour.” With a background in fine art, McKay is entirely self-taught when it comes to magazine layout, her principal job as Lola’s art director. (Despite the separation of tasks, McKay and Osborne share editorial control.)

Lola’s success on the Toronto arts scene has as much to do with its style as its substance. A cross between the cut-and-paste homemade quality of zines and the glossiness of consumer magazines, Lola treats visual arts with the appropriate attention to the visual. Although until recently most of the magazine’s distribution base has been art galleries, Lola shows no signs of the elitist sensibility that might imply. The magazine includes ongoing columns like Ask Lola’s Lawyer, featuring legal advice for artists from attorney Adam Bobker. (Last winter’s issue featured a letter from the “co-editors of a Toronto art magazine” about copyright infringement suspiciously signed “C.O. and S.M.”) There’s also a gossip column, sex column and the most popular department, the “shotgun review” section, featuring a slew of art exhibit mini-reviews. Contributors are cheekily identified at the back in “Who the Fuck Is Lola?” (Sample: “R.M. Vaughan is easily swayed by his emotions.”)

This is culture for the populace, albeit a progressive populace, and Lola has never been afraid to offend. So, were McKay and Osborne worried that “taking it to the next level” would jeopardize their obvious nose-thumbing tendencies?

For Osborne, bringing Salson-Gregg into the fold was a matter of practicality. “In the morning I’d be calling galleries to advertise and then in the afternoon call them to ask editorial questions. You can’t do that,” she says, laughing. Unlike Geist and HighGrader, Lola has relied heavily on advertising from the very beginning. Osborne and McKay were also able to secure a $50,000 line of low-interest credit after putting together an initial business plan. Lola only started receiving grant funding from the Canada Council this year, but the $20,000 it got didn’t go very far. (It also received an $80,000 multiyear grant from the CMF for its “growth spurt.”) Even though the magazine is still barely breaking even?it costs as much as $25,000 to print each issue?it’s clear the potential pool of advertisers eager to court Lola’s tragically hip readership is enormous.

Salson-Gregg has been busying herself landing advertising accounts like Absolut Vodka based on the statistics from Lola’s most recent readers’ survey. “We know our readers spend money going out,” she says. “They’re not stay-at-home types. So it’s about buying CDs, books, clothes, feeding into a lifestyle that’s about socializing and accessing the culture and entertainment that’s available.”

Last November, Lola finally went completely “newsstand,” ceasing to be a free publication in Toronto. While it had always cost $5 for magazines distributed outside the GTA, Lola’s price is now $3.95 almost everywhere. “It’s not unusual for a free magazine to go newsstand,” assures Osborne. “That’s a good thing.”

And even more radical changes are in the works. “We have to be more inclusive around what defines art and culture,” says Salson-Gregg, who this past winter became a Lola co-owner along with McKay and Osborne. “Moving beyond visual art into other forms, but staying true to the magazine, being smart without being turgid, funny without being silly, accessible without kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.” She would also like to see the magazine grow from a quarterly to a bimonthly. Still furiously brainstorming redesign ideas, the ladies are aiming for an early fall rebirth of Lola.

“My personal goal is that it survive,” McKay says when asked if she would like to see her magazine become as successful as the granddaddy of Toronto publications, Toronto Life. But she’s wary about courting the same affluent audience at the expense of Lola’s current activist core. “I’m interested in a more alternative readership. To me, Toronto Life is the most boring magazine in the world. As far as making that much money? Sure. Whether it’s possible? I don’t know.”

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The successful rearing of a small-market magazine takes as much careful nurturing as it does steely tenacity, and tends to consume every facet of a struggling publisher’s life. Geist senior editor Mary Schendlinger insists it’s the nature of the business. “People talk about Stephen and me retiring and we just kind of look at them,” she says. “We know we’ll be doing this forever. We don’t strive to separate those things.”

Schendlinger, Geist‘s kind-hearted “ambassador,” worked on the magazine without pay for 10 years; Osborne has yet to take a salary. (Both teach at Simon Fraser University and work on outside writing and editing projects.) “Mary keeps on an even keel and tends to temper things when they need tempering,” says managing editor Barbara Zatyko, Geist‘s lone full-time, paid employee.

Zatyko and Edwards both say the day-to-day operations of Geist have received a welcome streamlining as the magazine has grown. “Steve always had the business savvy,” Zatyko says, “but there was no time to incorporate it because printers were calling and screaming at us for not paying bills and we were always on the brink of going under. We now have more time to devote to strategic planning.” Adds Edwards, “We can actually put our efforts toward boosting circulation, selling the ads, getting involved in the community. Branding, if you want to use that word.”

When launching the first direct marketing campaign, Geist‘s natural audience was immediately evident to Osborne. Before publishing an issue, he spent U.S. $1,000 to buy Harper’s list of Canadian subscribers, mailing the first issue to half the list, the second issue to the other half. He got a five per cent response on both mailings?an unusually high return from a direct marketing campaign. According to current CMPA director Judith Parker, a former This Magazine publisher, the average subscription rate for a campaign is between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent. Unfortunately, reaching readers through “DM” campaigns can be a costly gamble for small magazines. Osborne estimates it currently costs $20 to court one potential Geist subscriber directly. As a rule, magazines that aren’t driven by advertising should spend no more than twice their annual subscription rate on direct marketing. “That way, you will make the money back in three or four years?if your cash flow lets you live that long!” Parker says.

Through its own readers’ surveys, Osborne found that Geist‘s readers are 52 per cent female, have one or more university degrees per household, and make between $40,000 to $80,000 a year. Most are white collar “cultural workers” who listen to a lot of CBC Radio. (“We didn’t even ask about TV.”) They also read seven times as many Canadian books as typical Canadian university graduates. Geist (which has a newsstand price of $4.95) recently started distributing on the B.C. ferry system, where it has been outselling many large consumer titles, although a minor outcry from more conservative ferry passengers erupted over the cover photo of the fall 2002 issue, a group shot of pink-bummed nudists frolicking by the ocean.

While Charlie Angus is relying mainly on loyal subscribers to keep HighGrader afloat (“I guess we’re not as efficient as we should be,” he says), Geist, like Lola, is aggressively looking to expand its readership. Osborne is itching to crack into the untapped market of Canadians living in the U.S. “The readers I show it to down here are always enthusiastic,” says Geist contributor and New York Times Magazine story editor Paul Tough. “More than other Canadian magazines, Geist has a confidence, a sense of place in the world.”

“These magazines will always struggle to increase audience share above a certain number, and I don’t think this is a particularly Canadian phenomenon,” says the CMPA’s John Degen. He points to the relatively low circulation of Harper’s magazine (a little over 200,000?modest for an American publication). That’s not to say he thinks it’s fair. “I personally love Geist. I read every issue cover to cover.”

Is it probable that one of the big three magazine publishing entities?Transcontinental, Rogers Publishing or St. Joseph Media, which published the recently folded Shift under its Multi-Vision arm?will ever champion a general-interest cultural publication like Geist? Don Sedgwick, the co-ordinator of Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing program in Toronto and a 25-year publishing veteran, believes it’s probably wishful thinking. “It would be hard to justify to any corporate board or publicly traded operation,” he says. “They’re not in the business of philanthropy. It would have to be someone with very deep pockets and enormous concerns for those kinds of issues.”

Osborne has no interest in relinquishing autonomy to the corporate world anyway, yet his editorial goals remain ambitious. Thanks to a recent $120,000 grant from the privately operated Tula Foundation, Osborne plans to expand the spring 2003 issue to 80 pages and, as part of his goal of becoming the “definitive Canadian magazine,” to resurrect the long-form essay that Saturday Night has all but dropped, and the photo essay that used to be the hallmark of Life magazine. Osborne and Schendlinger might share studio space on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, but the Grand Poobah of the West Coast literary world is realistic aboutGeist‘s overall commercial reach.

“We are not a consumer magazine, and we never will be,” he says.

After being grilled in his boardroom for over an hour, Osborne grows noticeably antsy. As I flip through my notes to ensure I haven’t missed anything, those steely eyes of his bore into mine once again. “You’ve got enough,” King Geist decrees as I quake in my red wedge-heeled boots. He’s probably right. I get the feeling that Stephen Osborne is seldom wrong, and that he knows it. He hands me mounds of back issues (there’s that Osborne generosity) and is off in a flash. Maybe he has an important meeting, or he has to prepare for his master of ceremonies gig at the annual Writers Fest’s poetry night. Or maybe he just wants to grab a bite at the local greasy spoon, where he will work on a chapter in the nonfiction novel about Vancouver he is writing, or sneak a few snapshots of the diners. (Robert Fulford once wrote “the perfect Geist story would take place in a donut shop,” but he’s probably never seen the Homer Caf?.) Whatever he’s up to, he’ll most likely be thinking about his magazine while he is doing it.

“He’s the one who lies awake at night with his fists clenched if there’s any struggle,” says Schendlinger. “It’s his magazine.” Still, it’s nice of him to share it with the rest of us.