Western Standard folds its print edition

The Western Standard magazine is ending its print edition. The announcement was made late on Friday by Ezra Levant, the Publisher. The newsmagazine, which was the inheritor of the mantle of Ted Byfield's late, unabashedly right-wing Alberta Report magazine, will continue online for now, or at least the magazine's popular Shotgun Blog.

The Western Standard had a decidedly conservative cast and a feisty and aggressive style. It was launched in March 2004 and has published 82 issues, but apparently was not profitable and not close enough to profitability to continue. The current issue is its last. It had an audited circulation of about 34,000.

"To my deep regret, the Western Standard has decided to stop publishing our print edition," Levant said in a posting on the magazine's blog.

"It's a purely financial decision. Even though our advertising revenues were stronger than ever, with marquee brands like GM, Mazda, BMW and Air Canada filling our pages, and even though we had the most loyal subscribers in the business, with an unheard-of 80% renewal rate, we just weren't close enough to profit."

"We were unable to generate a financial rate of return, but we had an enormous moral rate of return," Levant's post said.

Among the things for which the magazine will be remembered is its editorial independence and its contrarian take on many, if not most, public affairs subjects, with a viewpoint that was always at a considerable tangent to the mainstream media.

[UPDATE: Jonathan Kay of the National Post, on Sunday wrote a thoughtful article about Ezra Levant, saying that the conservative movement in this country needs such a creative gadfly (though Kay didn't use that term.)]

[UPDATE: The Globe and Mail finally got around to a story on the closure in Tuesday morning's edition.]

The magazine did everything with a certain flair, from running a luxury Caribbean cruise, replete with right-wing guest writers and speakers, to launching The Globies, a not-altogether tongue-in-cheek awards program highlighting bias in media. It was one of the earliest Canadian consumer magazines to offer a full digital subscription.

The magazine also showed courage, or foolhardiness (depending on whom you were talking to) in publishing the so-called "Danish cartoons" when no one else would or did. Levant says that one of his regrets is that he won't have a magazine to cover the forthcoming case at the Alberta Human Rights Commission over the publication of the cartoons. Characteristically and typically, he described it as a "kangaroo court". His rationale for printing the cartoons can be found here, and the saga of the human rights commission's attack and Levant's response, is here.

Levant thanked his staff and editorial team, his partner Matthew Johnston, who handled the considerable advertising sales (Levant told Masthead magazine (sub req'd) that WS was on track to sell more than $1 million in ad revenue this year) and his closing statement singled out Lyle Dunkley, as the magazine's chairman, chief investor and "greatest booster".

Read Ezra Levant's full statement.

[FURTHER:]From the "with friends like this, who needs enemies?" department:

The corpse of the Western Standard is not even cold yet and already the right wing blogosphere is wading in with paradoxically gleeful commentary. For instance, Jay Currie writes:

The couple of million dollars Ezra pissed away on the paper version of WS would have bought a huge, vibrant, well informed and largely untapped conservative resource. Instead, it has sent a lot of trees to the landfill.