Western Living and Vancouver acquired by Canada Wide Media

Two of western Canada's largest and most successful magazines  -- Vancouver magazine and Western Living -- have been acquired by Canada Wide Media. (Canada Wide publishes, among other things, BCBusiness, TV Week and the digital lifestyle title BCLiving.)

“These are two of the most prestigious magazines in Western Canada, and we are thrilled to add these exemplary brands to our portfolio,” said Peter Legge, chair and CEO of Canada Wide in a story on BCBusiness. “The addition of these titles to our stable of magazines gives us the largest reach in all of the West.”

With an annual readership of 314,000, Vancouver has been the city’s preeminent publication for more than 50 years. Western Living, which has an annual readership of 287,000, focuses on home design and décor, food and wine, and travel.  

The Legge family has owned Canada Wide for more than 40 years, establishing it as Western Canada’s largest independent media company.

CEO Peter Legge and president Samantha Legge

This transaction brings to an end the relatively shortlived ownership of the two magazines by Yellow Pages Homes Ltd. The two magazines had been left somewhat adrift when TC Media sold its eastern consumer magazines to Quebecor's TVA Group. They were picked up by Yellow Pages in May 2015 with the goal of augmenting the lifestyle strengths in the marketplace.

Yellow Pages is the official directories publisher of Bell Canada, Telus, Bell Aliant, MTS Allstream and a number of other companies. It describes itself as the leading digital company in Canada and owns and manages a slew of trademarked  online directories:  YellowPages.ca,  PagesJaunes.ca, Canada411.ca, and RedFlagDeals.com  as well as CanadaPlus.ca  and a network of seven local city sites, including MontrealPlus.ca, QuebecPlus.ca,  TorontoPlus.ca,  CalgaryPlus.ca,  EdmontonPlus.ca,  OttawaPlus.ca and  VancouverPlus.ca.

Western Living magazine unveiling redesign in a wider format

Western Living magazine has been completely redesigned: taking on a streamlined and refined  new logotype as WL, in a somewhat larger format. Readers will see the new look imminently as part of September's annual Designers of the Year issue. on newsstands and in subscribers mail slots at any moment. Concurrent with the redesign is a revamped website and responsive mobile website design. The inch-wider format gives the design more elbow room for its usual lavish photography and takes advantage of what print does so well. 

Editor-in-chief Anicka Quin, art director Paul Roelofs and publisher Tom Gierasimczuk talk about the redesign in the following video.

Western Living is under new ownership, as part of the Yellow Pages group in BC, along with sibling Vancouver magazine, although doubtless the redesign has been in the works for some time before that.

Why Yellow Pages bought Vancouver and Western Living

The editor of BCBusiness magazine, Matt O'Grady, last week spoke with the president and CEO of Yellow Pages about the company's recent acquisition of  Vancouver magazine and Western Living. Here is an excerpt of Julien Billot's comments about why the titles were purchased and his expectations of what happens now.

Yellow Pages has been rather rapidly getting out of the print business—or repositioning itself as a digital-first company. Why did you decide to purchase Vancouver and Western Living magazines? 

Yellow Pages CEO Julien Billot

The thinking was: more content. That’s the play. What you have to understand is that we have Caroline Andrews* on our team, formerly of TC Media—and she knew these publications very well. The big play here is not about print; it’s about content. Take a look at my phone. Today, we had approval from Apple to launch our new app called YP Dine. All the content from Vancouver magazine and Western Living will help us to feed into this local app. And that’s really the play. We can feed a lot of content into our media platforms.  

But to generate that content, you don’t really need to have a print product anymore, do you? What is the future of print within the Yellow Pages family? 

Let’s forget about print and think about the different usages you can have. You have two types of usages from a digital media perspective. You have search, and you have discovery or serendipity. Print, for me, is more about serendipity. Our major apps are mainly about search. The two parts are very important because if I’m looking for something very precisely, I’m using the search. If I don’t know exactly what to search, and I want to know what’s in the neighbourhood, that’s a different kind of media. Longer term, we really see our evolution in these two types of media: search media and serendipity or more “flipping” type of media. Today it’s on print but tomorrow it could be a very different format—ebooks or emagazines. Some people still prefer a paper book or magazine, but for sure we want to give these magazines more digital opportunities. We are not coming in to shut down print.  

Any plans to buy other city or regional magazines? 

No. It was a content play and a good tactical opportunity, but we don’t have a plan to buy other magazines.

*[Caroline Andrews became vice-president and chief publishing officer of Yellow Pages last June after being vice-president and group publisher of all TC Media's English consumer magazines, in particular the two Vancouver-based magazines in the Western Media Group. Her intimate knowledge of their businesses doubtless facilitated interest and the negotiations to buy them.]