When you think of Moses Znaimer, you think of television.

Znaimer is famous for launching numerous television properties, including CHUM, CityTV, MuchMusic, CBC's Cross Country Check-Up and Bravo!

All because he had an "ah-ha!" moment when he was 13 - he used his bar mitzvah money to purchase his immigrant family's first TV set when the medium was just coming into vogue in the 1950s, and decided to pursue a TV career.

Znaimer became a youth icon and champion of multiculturalism as he challenged conventional views and built several businesses.

Photo by Mia Klein
ZoomerMedia boss Moses Znaimer believes seniors have been ignored despite representing more than 80 percent of the country’s wealth.

"I'm rather an artiste of media," says Znaimer. "I take a little offence when people call me a businessman. The businessmen think I'm an artist and the artists think I'm a businessman. You live in that crack and you bind those worlds together. It's a dangerous place. It's pretty risky, but the rewards can be very lucrative."

Which makes many wonder why he now serves as president and CEO of Toronto-based ZoomerMedia Ltd., which publishes Zoomer magazine. Znaimer coined the buzzword Zoomers to describe baby boomers with zip.

The magazine, formerly known as CARP, advocates for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons. But to Znaimer, retirement is a dirty word.

"The 'retirement' word is now in the dustbin," says Znaimer, 66, who sports a short ponytail. "You can think of our organization as the Canadian Association of Re-invented Persons."

The group's name hasn't actually changed, but Znaimer, who believes that Canadian culture disrespects aging, vows to alter people's perceptions of CARP members.

He contends that seniors - our term, not his - have been ignored for too long, although they actually represent 80 percent of the country's wealth, do most of the voting, and few fully retire.

And, he has plenty to say on these issues ...

1. How did your family end up moving to Canada from Europe?

"My dad was from Latvia and my mom was from Poland. (They) were Jewish. They were each the only survivors of their families. They were on the run when they bumped into each other. They were trying to get away from the invading German army - the Nazis. They were actually trying to get to Shanghai, which during the Second World War had a significant Jewish relief operation. It was a free city at the time. But he got her pregnant. What were they thinking? So they got as far as Tajikistan. They stopped and sat out the war there. They were people with quite sophisticated education. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviets were repatriating other Iron Curtain-country citizens. Because my mom was Polish, they weren't going to get much farther from there. They snuck into the Western zone and, by midnight rowboat, crossed a canal in (East) Berlin into West Berlin. I kind of grew up in a Displaced Persons camp. They eventually found one relative left alive and that was somebody who lived in a place called Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (I was told:) 'They speak French and it's cold as hell.' " 2. What do you remember about your family's final days in the Soviet Union?

"In the DP camp one day, I was given something to drink that was cold and dark and effervescent and miraculous-tasting for someone who'd never had anything like that before. It was handed to me by some soldiers, because this was in the immediate aftermath of the war. I went back to our barracks and I tried to explain this to my parents, who had no experience with that either. It wasn't until we got to Canada - I don't know how many months later - and I had a Coca-Cola, and there it was. I have different images. When you're on the run, you get to be a fairly sophisticated kid. You see a lot of stuff, which you don't if you have a calm, suburban middle-class Canadian upbringing. You hear a lot of languages, you pass through a lot of places, you experience different food, and because you're a child, you don't realize the enormity of it all. It's kind of fun, but in a weird way."

3. How did your lives change after you arrived in Montreal?

"My parents had a typical immigrant experience. First of all, they were relatively mature, so they had much more difficulty in capturing the language. I had a functional use of English by the time we made the crossing. We crossed over in a converted troopship ... My parents were educated, but couldn't get work that matched their learning. My mom worked as a waitress. My dad worked as a bricklayer and then as a presser in a garment factory.

"Eventually, he opened up a shoe store, but they really never were able to gain the same place in society as they would have had, had their own world stayed intact. They were relatively young, but my mom was highly educated in science and mathematics. My father had some aspirations to be an opera singer He was very arts-oriented and a little unworldly. Of course, those worlds were destroyed. They made do, as many immigrants had to."

4. What language did you speak in the home?

"Patois (a dialect of French).

Primarily Yiddish, mixed with whatever the local language was.

My mom, to her friends, would be speaking Polish. So we'd hear a little of that in the house. There weren't that many Latvians around, so I didn't hear that language. Russian was also an early language, because Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union at the time ... There was obviously German around, because the camp was in Western-occupied Germany ... My studies were in Hebrew, because I had a formal, classic, semi-religious educational upbringing. All of that stuff was swarming around me. To put pressure like that on a young child actually makes you mature. It makes you more social."

5. What was your childhood dream?

Moses Znaimer

"My heroes were literary. My heroes were all charismatic political figures. I didn't have typical, common interests. Great orators. Transformative social figures, primarily writers. To the degree that I thought about it at all, I thought I might become a big character, somebody who wrote serious political analysis, because I was doing that stuff early on. We had very little contact with pop culture."

6. What prompted you to study philosophy and government?

"Our family was a product of compulsive political forces. Revolutionary forces, counter-revolutionary forces. It was just a natural extension of my circumstance."

7. How much actual business training do you have?

"Zero. Since you write for a business magazine, here's my confession: I have never, ever, not once in my life woken up and had the thought that: 'Today, I have to make money.' I love to make good TV, I'd love to make great radio, I want to make a superb magazine. And the money follows, but I never set out to make money."

8. What does it take to run a media empire?

"Holy cow! Empire is a wild exaggeration for this little collection I have, and gathered in the last two years. But the beauty of an entrepreneur is that you're required to express a range of talent.

"Corporate life is different, it depends on very minute specializations which are somehow muted together. But the starting of things requires a head in the clouds above and the feet in the mud below ... An entrepreneur, for me, is an artist of business. The work is as much intuitive as it is deductive. We gussy it up and people say: 'I've done the research' ... but the fact is, it's coming out of your stomach. It's coming out of your drive, and that drive has to be excessive. It really needs to be, in a sense, a bit crazy. Otherwise, you can't get it done."

9. How would you describe television's influence on Canadian culture?

"It's stupendous. The impact of all media is stupendous in the world. The solution to most problems is education and education is driven by media. That's why politicians spend most of their time trying to curry favour with media. One or two guys at the highest level, they have their hands on levers, right? Everybody else depends on getting the story out. So the impact is fundamental and enormous."

10. What's your role at CARP?

"I am the president. I was executive-director, but I was just elevated to president at our last annual general meeting. It's the same. I'm the chief operating person. The advocacy is non-profit. The media arm is a profitable company. The money that's made in the media company, that supports the advocacy ... You don't just call up (federal Finance Minister) Jim Flaherty and have lunch once, and everything gets fixed."

11. Why did you want to launch Zoomer?

"When City and Chum were sold, I was in the proverbial cuffs for a while. I just couldn't do anything in the trade. Once that came off, I wasn't going to go and repeat myself. Those franchises were gone. You can't replicate a CityTV. You can't get the frequencies, you can't get the presence. In any case, even the moment that I launched MuchMusic, I was already thinking: 'Well, what happens 10 years from now?' Because youth is not frozen ... Everybody ages. Way back, 20-25 years ago, I was already thinking: 'How do I follow my people?' I was serving this massive generation called the Boomers but - in a sense, almost alone - realized those people get older every year. I determined that I was going to continue to serve that public. People look at me and think: 'Well, that's a little weird. He was doing the youth thing, and now he's switched.' I haven't switched at all. I'm still with my peeps. But my peeps are now 60-plus. I decided, once I got back in the game, that I would either create or accumulate a suite of media that spoke to my peeps."

12. Are you planning a television show about Zoomers?

"Yes, I am planning at least that and, I hope, more. I can't say much, but people have noted that it's a little strange that I have a magazine, web, radio, but no TV ... So I'm working my way towards something."

13. Considering your background in television, what's it like running a magazine?

"It's a different experience. Mostly, the lead times are the hardest thing for me to deal with ... It's a different pace of orientation, but that's what makes the challenge interesting."

14. How are you going to expand your market?

"The magazine has an internal circulation of just under 200,000. We're putting another 50,000-60,000 on the newsstands. The previous incarnation of the magazine had a service orientation and it was full of retirement-home ads, bathrooms that you can step into and false teeth. Now, look at this magazine. There's beauty, there's fashion, there's high-end (products) as well as that other stuff. I'm not getting rid of that other stuff. We are in the process of getting the major advertisers of Canada to understand.

"They do understand - it's just that they haven't changed their behaviour yet."

15. How do you plan to make Zoomer and CARP edgy?

"I have to tell you, for certain old-timers in our organization, this is plenty edgy - and this is moving fast. It challenges people who have moved into a more conventional image of what aging is. I also believe that you've got to live the life. I never made TV channels that I wasn't interested in watching ...

I've lived the life and I've become a not-bad example of re-invention.

People talk about it, but it's not that easy to do, and yet more and more people are doing it. People give up the corporate job, they become small entrepreneurs, they start the store they always wanted to or the consultancy, or they start a charity. I like to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk."

16. How would you describe the state of Canada's media industry?

"It's highly consolidated and corporate. Building is always more interesting than hanging on, and I think we're in a phase of hanging on. The building is largely done. The entrepreneurial class, the generation that created most of these entities, has passed or is passing."

17. What's your take on convergence?

"The web is the new television. We're highly active on the web. If you look in on our radio-station sites, they're the most visual in the world. We are trying to be very smart about it. For example, without any fanfare at all, we started a social-networking site for grownups. Facebook is for kids. Zoomers.ca is for grownups. It gives the lie to this idea that you need your grandkids to tell you how to work the computer. Seven million people - our demo - are on the internet ... and are engaged in a lot of new discussions on issues as well as a lot of dating, mating and relating, because one of the dirty little secrets of aging is ... we like sex."

18. What do you say to people who would call you a dirty old man?

"Oooh. No one ever has, so I haven't had to deal with that. People are now more comfortable talking about and wanting both information and vehicles to have and share affection. It doesn't die because you reach the age of 45 or 50 or 60. We're in a frank moment in history where that can be discussed. It always was there, but it wasn't discussed. A dirty old man is ageism. What does that mean? I'm a dirty young man. If you're a man, you're having these thoughts all the time. That's a function of being alive."

19. What's your definition of retirement?

"This whole discussion is about the abandonment of the word.

Retirement means to withdraw - to disappear. None of us is interested in that. Retirement is a period of refreshment and re-invention. It's exciting to begin again. To learn again. To build again. An exciting life actually gives you more life. It's when you withdraw, it's when you detach, that you begin that decline."

20. What will you do when you're not running Zoomer or CARP anymore?

"I don't spend a second thinking about that, because there's no reason for me not to be doing those things ... I said it before. I've been lucky to do OK by doing good things. This is a great mission."

Moses Znaimer

* Title: President/CEO, Zoomer Media Ltd.

* Born/raised/age: Tajikistan/Montreal/66.

* Education: Znaimer has an honours BA in philosophy and politics from McGill and a masters in government from Harvard.

* Family: Znaimer is not married, but has been "dating this one girl for 38 years. I don't like to rush things.”

No children.

* Career: After completing his university studies, Znaimer began his broadcasting career at the CBC in the 1960s and co-created Cross Country Check-Up, which is still popular today. He left the CBC over creative issues and entered private broadcasting. Over the next three decades, he co-founded and served as executive producer with such TV stations, channels and networks as CityTV, CHUM TV, Bravo, Space, CablePulse24, Star, Fashion Television, Book Television, SexTV, Canadian Learning Television, MuchMusic and MuchMoreMusic. He has also developed ventures and broadcast licences in Argentina, Colombia, Spain and Finland. Throughout his career, he has emphasized diversity, multiculturalism and multiracial images. Two years ago, after CHUM and CityTV were sold, he assumed the reins of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) and acquired its magazine through ZoomerMedia Ltd., a company that he acquired through a dot-com reverse takeover about eight years ago. He also operates Toronto radio stations New Classical 96.3 FM and 103.1 FM, and AM 740, which has been rebranded as Zoomer Radio.

* Awards: In April, Znaimer received the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award for an invaluable contribution to the growth and advancement of the Canadian music industry. His numerous other honours include the Urban Alliance on Race Relations Diversity Award, The Human Rights Centre Gold Medal and the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews Human Relations Award.

* Moonlighting: Znaimer is involved with a world environmental group called The Waterkeeper Alliance, headed by Robert Kennedy, Jr.

* Passions: Media.

ZoomerMedia Ltd

* Brass: Moses Znaimer, president and CEO; Gord Poland, chief financial officer; Nancy Dixon, controller.

* Profile: ZoomerMedia owns and operates Zoomer Magazine, formerly known as CARP, which caters to the interests of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons. The magazine features such topics as health and wellness, finance, travel and lifestyles. Zoomer also owns and operates such web properties as fiftyplus.com, carp.ca and electronic and print newsletters for CARP members and others who are interested. The company was created through a reverse takeover of a public dot-com company that formerly had ties to CARP.

* Stats: Zoomer has approximately 50 employees. The magazine is delivered to approximately 190,000 households. CARP has approximately 350,000 members.

* Recent Stock Price (TSXV:ZUM): $0.11 (52-week range) $0.09-$0.40.

* Website: www.zoomer.ca * HQ: Suite 105, 550 Queen St. East, Toronto, M5A 1V2 * Phone: 416-363-7394.

(Monte Stewart can be reached at monte@businessedge.ca)