Graham F. Scott has a new job as editor of This Magazine, a journal 15 years older than he is. Founded in 1966, the publication has been around for long enough to be credited for kickstarting a few careers. Still, those crunchy granola radicals, who first felt the urge to rail against the system, remain part of the 5,000-circulation constituency, and contribute to the charitable Red Maple Foundation that helps to pay the publisher, editor, and printer along with the part-time contributors and freelance writers. 

 

Then again, 27-year-old Scott feels he has already survived the boomer hazing ritual – albeit three years ago, during his stint as editor-in-chief of University of Toronto student newspaper, The Varsity.

“We were still labouring under the legacy of the 1960s,” says Scott. “That golden age still lingers, and it’s hovering over student newspapers to this day. It didn’t help that it was the paper’s 125th anniversary, so there was an expectation that we would be looking back at what the previous generations had achieved.

“Meanwhile, I was trying to steer it a little more away from its own ideological stance. And that meant trying to get as many different voices in the paper as possible. But, I was mostly interested in contributors who’d make people want to read it.”

Can wistful sit-ins of the ‘60s be compared with more strident additions to the campus life calendar like Israeli Apartheid Week? Scott spent a year grappling with such debates — and then took an internship with Canadian Business, where tasks involved helping compile the country’s annual “Rich 100” for the edification of an audience striving to get their names on there, too.

“I try not to be a snob about these things,” says Scott. “People have come to think progressive-leaning means you aren’t interested in business, and that’s simply not true. Leftist politics were always rooted in economic issues: labour exploitation, and a critique of where the money goes, who’s getting it, and why.

“Somewhere down the line these topics were overtaken by identity politics, political correctness, and lots of whining. You end up with protest for its own sake, which is hard to intellectually take. And it wouldn’t help the magazine to be presented as the work of some bomb-throwing anarchists —instead, we can ask about what’s going on here, and seriously analyze the received wisdom about it.”

Mainstream exposure for This — most recently on the occasion of its 40th anniversary issue in 2006 — tends to condescendingly point out how civilized its rhetorical approach has become, with an emphasis on packaging designed to motivate a flip at the newsstand. (While the current July/August cover portrays federal NDP leader Jack Layton as a beady-eyed rogue worthy of criminal arrest, the accompanying feature turns out to be a somewhat less scintillating slab of socialist political science.)

But the contemporary life of the non-profit publication starts somewhere around 1994, when a previous Varsity editor, Naomi Klein, was recruited to revitalize its pages, in part by helping the aging This readers interpret the enigma that was Generation X.

Repositioning the effort amidst the wave of independent desktop-published zines helped mitigate the fact that nobody involved was being paid very much, but that schtick ran its course within a year. A feature from a 1997 Ryerson Review of Journalism made the case that This would be unlikely to outlast that century.

More than a decade later, the bi-monthly is still producing new issues — although, like everything else in the magazine industry, its annual budget hasn’t budged much from where it was back then: the low-to-mid-$200K range. Yet, maybe a print publication understood to be campaigning for a greater good is better off today than magazines celebrate copious consumption, only to risk strangulation by their own shoestring.

This’s new editor might be assumed to have an insider perspective on these matters; Graham’s father, D.B. Scott, is a communications consultant whose Canadian Magazines blog has emerged as the main spot online to complain about The Walrus — or any topic related to the ever-precarious industry whose big news this week is that single copies don’t sell as much anymore.

“There are as many benefits as drawbacks with the way things work in this country,” rationalizes the younger Scott. “You can usually call up someone else for a favour, because there’s a common bond of wanting to pull together for the good of the business. And, to a certain degree, you have to survive on charm.”

While he grew up in a Cambridge, Ontario home overflowing with disposable printed materials, Scott deigned to be an architect, until it sunk in that he couldn’t draw. But he steered clear of a journalism degree — something which his This predecessor, Jessica Johnson, just vacated her position to pursue at Ryerson.

But, for the purpose of running a magazine with the slogan “Because Everything is Political,” Scott wonders if the academic perspective on meta-media theory and analysis is way overrated.

“Most people who attend j-school are at least middle-class,” he says, “and then it turns out the profession pays so poorly that they can’t afford to stick with it. That not only affects everyone who’s still trying, it also impacts the work they’re able to do.

“The result is that the people most predisposed to taking an interest in subjects like labour, the working class and poverty tend not to end up pursuing the craft.”

Can this somehow be equalized online? South of the border, a million daily Daily Kos readers can’t be wrong — except to those predisposed to thinking they are — compared to the stodgy state of its made-in-Canada equivalent Rabble. This energies also shifted away from online content in recent months, something Scott is determined to rectify — although he staunchly believes in the continued value of applying ink to paper.

“A good magazine can deliver an experience that hasn’t been replaced by anything else,” he says. “The all-Facebook news cycle isn’t with us quite yet.”

No, but for the past five years or more, a cluster of right-leaning blogs in Canada have claimed to be dancing on the grave of many mainstream outlets they abhor.

“There’s still an idea that the media is filled with lefty types who are filling the news with socialist ideas,” says Scott. “That itself creates a credibility gap for conservatives insisting there’s a communist behind every fence post in the country, waiting to jump out and tax them.

“But the fact remains that most outlets in this country are afraid to rock the boat,” says Scott. “It’s our job to be the publication conservatives complain about. “

Scott’s first issue at the helm of This will be dated November/December, although he spent the past three years in the ranks — for the past year as the columns editor — enough time to leave him feeling assured that the efforts will be digested.

“I’ll admit to initially being surprised by the number of people at The Word on the Street festival who felt a connection the magazine,” he says. “There are enough boldface names from Canadian arts and letters on the subscriber list — even if I can’t divulge who they are — to convince me it helps foster a legitimate discussion.

 

“An interesting story, though, should be just as interesting to readers of any age. I don’t expect to be kept awake at night wondering if any of them will end up feeling alienated.”

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