Open letter to Ted Byfield
Dear Ted,
Two decades ago, I attributed the success of your baby, Alberta Report, to classic western independence and entrepreneurship. And it was, then.
But it never really became a legitimate business. It was riding a wave that has now passed, and your management missed the recent trends. The decline became obvious when you had to switch from weekly to bi-monthly a few years ago. Finally in April, when The Report became Citizen’s Centre Report, you began publishing monthly, and I knew my subscription fees were becoming a de facto donation to your newly minted non-profit organization, which had purchased the unprofitable business. The Report advertised that the subscriptions were becoming less expensive, but we subscribers got less bang for our buck.
As of this month, the remains of your baby have been sold to a company, comprising some of the old management, that will turn The Report into Alberta Business Report, a monthly that will cover Western Canadian businesses.
But as it is now out of your hands (although I hear Link Byfield may still write for it), we are seeing the obituaries. You’ve said 30 years is a good go of it, but a magazine that survives that long should be able to last longer. Unfortunately, at 30 she was already an old lady who’d seen her best days long ago.
Your business model was programmed to fail. The magazine has been so identified with you personally, and your personal ideas, that when those ideas became dated, so did the mag. In fact, The Report was starting to look like an old grump, of late.
Despite what it said on the masthead, The Report was never really a “newsmagazine”; it was an advocacy journal. You covered one party and one party’s issues, and as they ascended, starting in the late 1970s and peaking in 1993, your baby grew too. But the recent and gradual decline of that movement has helped lead to the decline of The Report. It also focused on one shrinking religion (at least in Canada), namely Christianity. Hence, ever-greater numbers of readers and advertisers were viewing it as a “niche” publication. That’s not to say that what you were doing was unimportant, because we need a plurality of voices in our society. But your staffing levels, at one time numbering around 100, was unjustifiably large for such a specialty newsletter.
To survive in business you need to be flexible and adaptive. But as you had staked advocacy ground, it became difficult for you to backtrack without losing some legitimacy.
In your final Report column, you admitted that “. . . we were all wrong . . . we were wrong again . . . we were wrong yet again . . . we weren’t just wrong, we were crazy,” referring to some of your significant miscalculations in the Reform movement. It was courageous backtracking, but it was simply stating what many of us had realized by the 1993 federal election – namely, that Reform would split the traditional Progressive Conservative vote. Reform might have been started by some astute Liberals if it hadn’t been started by some short-sighted westerners.
Since The Report was not critical enough of the right side of the political equation, cynics like me dismissed you as inflexible. And as the Alliance party faced a self-destructive, stupid mutiny two years ago, you and your now middle-aged baby seemed lost in how to react.
Even before that, as Reformers became a part of the well-pensioned establishment and moved in to Stornaway (violating their own promises), you winked and nudged, when you should have been raking them over the coals. Reform should have been shunned from your principled pages. But you had no other similarly “principled” party to back, so you were trapped. Ironically, in the end, you were not backing policies, you were backing parties, and making some hefty compromises in the process. As this became more clear, readers like me grew weary.
I agree with what you’ve said to many of the interviewers about your publishing zenith. You capitalized on ripe targets that no one else covered: a weakening education system, excessive government spending (and thus taxation), and growing western alienation. But now these issues are being dealt with, if not dead. Plus, your market has fragmented. The Sun chain and CanWest Global are now covering those topics, and The National Post is an advocacy journal modelled on your template.
So without a fresh perspective, the death of The Report looks like the timely death of another old timer. My 92-year-old grandmother used to say, “When I die people are not going to say, ‘What a shame.’ They will all say, ‘She died at a ripe old age.’ ”
And the same goes for your baby. It was time for her to go.
