Gosh, what a surprise. The Walrus leads this year’s National Magazine Awards with 33 nominations, followed by Maclean’s with 27 and Toronto Life with 26. This compares to 28 for The Walrus, 27 for Toronto Life, and 20 for Maclean’s last year, and 37 for The Walrus, 29 for Toronto Life, and 18 for Maclean’s in 2008. L’actualité is occasionally allowed to rupture the Toronto Top Three, but only if it promises not to let it happen too often.

The Walrus is a radically improved magazine since I last wrote about it — for one thing, under John Macfarlane, it actually looks and reads like a magazine. So is that the reason it now dominates the awards? No. It does so because it fills the historical role of Toronto alpha-magazine, a role that used to be filled by Saturday Night. When I was jobbed-in briefly as an editor at SN in the late ’90s, I handled seven stories that were eventually nominated for National Magazine Awards. I’d like to think this means that I was the most freaking brilliant editor since Tina Brown, but all it really means is that I was working at Saturday Night.

There must always be a Toronto alpha-magazine, so when Saturday Night folded it was briefly succeeded by Toronto Life, but that raised the uncomfortable question: if this is a national magazine award, why is a city magazine all over it? Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when The Walrus finally got good enough to assume the stance — though it’s worth noting that that happened before The Walrus actually became good.

So now we are returned to the status quo: The Walrus will win mucho d’awards, just because. Meantime, the “coveted” Magazine of the Year prize will continue to be handed out on a semi-regular basis to magazines not from Toronto, as per last year’s award to Alberta Views. Which begs the question: if these publications aren’t good enough to receive double-digit nominations — which they apparently never are — how are they good enough to be the Magazine of the Year?

One explanation would be that the award-givers understand that an allegedly national prize must occasionally be given to a magazine not from Toronto, lest it appear to be less than national. But that would be cynical.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. It would be nice if the English-language judges weren’t overwhelmingly from Toronto (which, despite the claims of the organizers, they are). In the case of the French-language and bilingual juries, however, it’s inevitable that they’ll be drawn almost entirely from central Canada. No, the only possible solution is to stop calling them the National Magazine Awards. Pick some deserving Toronto magazine icon — Pierre Berton, Doris Anderson — and name them after him/her. That would be fitting. But they have never been national magazine awards, and never will be. So why keep pretending they are?

A new issue of The Walrus is upon us, and across the nation, crickets chirp.

The cover story offers this breaking news: the earth is warming. “In the last decade,” writes its author, Alanna Mitchell, “the most authoritative reports on climate change have presented increasingly pessimistic worst-case scenarios about rising temperatures.” Really? Don’t know how I missed that.

Read further and you find that what the story actually wants to tell us is that severe climate change may occur more abruptly than anticipated. This is known as burying the lede. But given that this, too, is old news — based as it is on a study released in 2001 — it wasn’t much of a lede to begin with.

Elsewhere in the issue we find another been-there, done-that story, about the fact that women are outpacing men at Canadian universities. This is based on an only slightly fresher, 2004 Statistics Canada study. (Warning: anytime a magazine article is pegged to a StatsCan report, run, flee in the other direction, lest your eyes glaze over and fall from your head.) “As evidenced by a spate of academic studies, government reports, and newspaper and magazine articles, in the United States public and political concern about male underachievement is on the rise.” In other words, now that everyone else has done the story, we figured that we should too.

And, of course, there’s the Toronto magazine’s obligatory “hewers of wood, drawers of water” perspective on the rest of the nation — though most aren’t quite as literal about it as The Walrus. The front “Field Notes” section contains a story on abalone poachers in BC; the well (middle) has a pictorial on lumberjacks in Quebec. (All right, the former are “drawers of things from water.” Same damn diff.)

The photos of the lumberjacks aren’t even run large enough to turn them into ironic fetish objects. Tsk, tsk; what is magazine design coming to?

The Walrus has every right to be just as boring as it pleases. That’s the Canadian way — or at least it used to be, back about the time editor Ken Alexander was cutting his teeth at the CBC. What it doesn’t have is the right to be subsidized while doing it. If The Walrus has no interest in being fresh, engaging, provocative, and/or entertaining — in other words, a magazine that people want to buy and advertisers, hence, want to advertise in — then it doesn’t deserve even the postal subsidy it gets from the federal government, much less the $112,272 it received from the Canada Magazine Fund in 2005-06. The deal is, you have to at least try to sell some copies of the magazine if you want to be given access to the public teat. Or if it isn’t, it should be.

The Walrus claims a circulation of over 60,000, though based on what I don’t know — they aren’t tracked by the Print Measurement Bureau. Colour me sceptical. At any rate, even if that figure is accurate, it isn’t enough — as evidenced by the ad pages in the current issue — to sustain a magazine with The Walrus‘s ambitions, or pretensions. And yet the cover of this month’s issue seems calculated to repulse as many potential buyers as possible. It reminds me of nothing so much as the rills of grimy snow that accumulate along Canadian streets in late winter. (Apparently, it’s a photo of a glacier in Alaska, though so closely cropped that it’s become, if not an ironic fetish object, a meaningless abstraction.)

Many people blame Alexander, who also co-founded the magazine and sank $2.5 million of his own money into it, for chasing away a series of talented editors so he could run the shop himself. Not me. The Walrus may be dull, but it was even more dull before. At least some of the articles provide a smidgen of insight into their subjects now; the previous editorial regime reached its low-point with an article on Iraq by the late Bill Cameron, which did nothing more than cobble together everything we already knew. It was possibly the most unnecessary magazine article I have ever read.

But we’re talking increments here. The global warming story in the current issue is a close cousin of that Iraq story, and only slightly more fetching. (And speaking of irony, isn’t there something just a bit disingenuous about a magazine ululating over carbon build-up in the atmosphere, while killing a few more trees to do it?)

Tell you what. Head over instead to this post on the blog Canadian Magazines, which recounts The Walrus‘s recent travails, followed by a fractious debate between Alexander and a few of his tormentors. It’s entertaining, lively, and illuminating.

What a concept.

Does a magazine’s title determine its chances of success?

It doesn’t seem to. The Walrus, having weathered that not-paying-freelancers-on-time thing, seems to be doing all right, despite being named . . . The Walrus. And despite being . . . dull. (The Walrus reminds me of nothing so much as The New Yorker in its pre-Tina Brown and David Remnick days, when worthiness was everything, and style and entertainment-value had died about the same time as Harold Ross.)

But enough about them; let’s talk about us. This magazine is called backofthebook.ca. The back of the book, in publishing parlance, is the latter, say, third of a magazine, where most of the commentary usually goes. I like to think of it as the place where the smart kids hang out. But then I would; almost everything I’ve written for magazines over 25 years has been for the back of the book.

One colleague has suggested the name is a bit of a mouthful. Fine; call us “Bob,” then. Bob. There’s a nice, friendly name for a magazine.

By either name, we aspire to be nothing less than a successor to the late, strangely under-lamented Saturday Night magazine. The key word here being “aspire.” I realize, given the humbleness of our beginnings — you’re looking at ‘em — any such claim may seem risible. But give us 118 years, which is how old SN was at the time of its apparently final death, and then see how we’re doing.

There will be differences, of course. Plenty of them. The main one, you will have noticed, is that we’re online. When I worked for Saturday Night as a writer and editor, back around the fin de siecle, I lamented the fact that it didn’t have a better website. And as it was going through its various death throes, I wondered why it didn’t just morph into a Canadian version of Salon or Slate and be done with the cost of mass-murdering trees. Readership would have dropped, sure. But it might have survived.

But of course, the generation responsible for publishing our magazines and newspapers remains paper-centric. So much the worse for them (and those trees). We note that the success of Salon and Slate has put to rest the old canard that people won’t read a magazine online. Some won’t. And for them we recommend the Print function in their web browser. (Try it now. There. See? How easy was that?)

We also come to you from the West. We don’t intend to make a big deal of that; it’s not our intention to be a non-crazy version of Western Standard. But it will, no doubt, inflect the way we choose and write our stories. Place does that — something which editors in Toronto have never managed to figure out.

Our politics are liable to be left-of-centre, if only because my own are. But mostly I hope we’ll be contrarian, afflicting conventional wisdom of all kinds. Personally, I don’t care what a story’s politics are as long as it’s smart. And entertaining. Did we mention entertaining?

The rest we’ll make up as we go along.

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