A little over five years ago, my predecessor, Steven Sandor, sent a cryptic email to me and nine other writers — his “inside circle of freelancers” for what was then still Avenue Edmonton magazine. He wanted to meet with us on Zoom the very next day, a Friday, at 4 p.m.
Media professionals call this the “late Friday dump” — the prime-time slot for bad news you hope will slip past reporters. News outlets loathe this tactic when governments employ it but embrace it themselves, which in June 2020 was ever more frequent, and so I assumed the worst.
After all, one of my last notes from Steve, on March 17 — six days after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic — was to cancel my latest assignment. The magazine was in “transition,” he said, which I interpreted as a state of chaos caused by collapsing ad revenues. His next missive, months later, was an attempt at damage control after our sister publication, Avenue Calgary, announced it would publish exclusively online until the fall. “Don’t panic,” Steve wrote. Now he wanted us at an urgent Friday meeting, signed NDA required. Sure Steve, we won’t panic.
But it wasn’t bad news. It was, in fact, great news. After 14 years, Avenue Edmonton was parting with its Calgary partners, reinventing itself as something authentically Edmonton.
Truth be told, I’d wished for this since interning in 2008. Avenue Edmonton felt awkward on its feet then, less from youth than from a brand tailored to Calgary’s more corporate, status-driven culture. Edmonton is an institutional city, more socially minded, preferring grassroots initiatives over marquee spectacles.
Of course, there was much good to that awkward fit — modest Edmonton could use Cowtown bravado. Since launching locally in 2006, Edmonton’s cultural landscape has become more ambitious, and Avenue Edmonton magazine played no small part in that. I sincerely believe its coverage of the finer things in life motivated many to raise their own standards and take more pride in themselves. Best Restaurants inspired healthy competition that elevated our dining scene, while Top 40 Under 40 became a benchmark of professional recognition that young leaders now strive toward.
What would change was voice: not aspirational but inspirational, less about lifestyle than life. The future would be guided not by a brand guide but by values — elevated, informed, connected, approachable — words scrawled years ago on the back of an Avenue poster and still in our office today.
The very essence of the new magazine was in its name: Edify — to enlighten, to uplift, to strengthen. And that’s what we’ve done from the first issue five years ago.
Since then, the magazine has celebrated Edmonton’s innovators while holding space for difficult stories that deepen our understanding of ourselves. It has been a platform where slow journalism — the kind that takes time, care and context — could thrive in an age of speed and distraction.
In its first year, Edify won Magazine of the Year at the Alberta Magazine Awards. It has continued to make an impression as tastemaker and storyteller — helping the city understand itself, set cultural standards and preserve its picture in time.
And now that I’ve told you about our celebrated start, I want you to sit with a thought: what if it were gone?
The marker of good journalism is transparency, so let me be frank: every issue is a fight for survival. At the root is a collapse of ad dollars — the foundation on which glossy magazines were built. For most of the past century, advertising allowed magazines to flourish. In boom times, Avenue Edmonton swelled to 154 pages and even turned advertisers away.
Then came the 2015 crash. Marketing budgets were slashed across the country. Many advertisers pulled out and never returned, convinced they could reach customers more efficiently and cheaply through digital platforms. Online ads are indeed cheaper, easier to place, and come with the metrics — clicks, conversions, referral data — that social media has trained companies to expect. But they’re not more efficient, as they compete in an over-saturated marketplace where attention is fleeting. Print, on the other hand, offers a captive audience with storytelling and images that command attention. Yet, because there is no dashboard, those benefits could not be quantified, and magazines never fully recovered.
The pandemic was crueller still. Our publisher, Trudy Callaghan, drew on the company’s reserves to buy out the Calgary partners and rebrand the magazine as Edify — an idea, and even a name, that had been simmering in her mind for years. It was a bold move, very much in step with the vision she showed when she and her late partner first launched Avenue Edmonton. In the middle of a crisis, she chose to bet on Edmonton and on the future of this magazine. But revenues didn’t rebound as hoped, and today our issues hover at 68 pages.
We’ve tried to adapt. Newsletters, podcasts and events have become integral, and I’m grateful for the silver linings — they let us tell more stories and reach more readers. But they haven’t closed the gap in ad revenue and they certainly don’t make it any easier to produce physical media at a time when printing costs have soared. And yet the subtleties matter: the weight of the paper, the depth of the colour, the tactile quality of holding a finished issue. These are not incidental luxuries; they are part of what makes a magazine worth lingering with.
Meanwhile, the costs of producing our journalism have not changed. In this very issue, three stories — Scott Messenger’s memoir about preserving an ailing bandmate’s brilliance (“Crescendo Ending”); Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold’s feature on a contested museum artifact (“The Secret Life of Horus”); and Zachary Ayotte’s essay on the future of arts funding (“Keeping the Curtains Up”) — consumed more than three-quarters of our editorial budget. Each went through multiple drafts and was meticulously verified by our lead fact-checker, Brooklyn Hollinger, before moving to creative director Kim Larson and her roster of freelance photographers and illustrators. After designing them into stunning features, Kim returned each story to undergo several rounds of proofreading by every member of the editorial team, including associate publisher Jennifer Walton. Keeping in mind that our production involves two fewer editors than it would have 10 years ago, the combined hours for these three stories was still over 150.
Quality takes time, and time is expensive. This is why we cannot publish work of this depth online alone. Digital ads may support lighter coverage — restaurant reviews, event guides, artist profiles — but not the ambitious, time-consuming reporting that serves a wider public interest.
Few city magazines in Canada still publish fact-checked reporting and in-depth literary journalism. Each closure means the loss of a civic voice.
This precarity isn’t unique to Edify. It defines journalism today. Since 2008, Canada has lost 11 per cent of its local news outlets. Edmonton has been hit especially hard: the Local News Research Project ranked it the third-most “news-deprived” city in the country, losing a third of its outlets, from Metro News and Alberta Venture to Vue Weekly and See.
It’s in this context that people sometimes complain to me, “The magazine is all advertising now.” I welcome the chance to correct them. Proportionally, Avenue and now Edify have always been majority editorial. Believe me, businesses try to buy coverage — an entitlement encouraged by less transparent magazines blurring journalistic red lines, undermining readers’ trust and, quite frankly, insulting their intelligence. To be clear, we don’t take money from subjects, never have, and any potential conflicts of interest are disclosed in the writer’s words or in mine through an editor’s note.
So no, there aren’t more ads. Rather, their presence is more prominent because the page count is half what it once was, and because their nature has shifted. Advertisers increasingly want advertorials: articles that tell their brand story. We’ve always offered these with ethical standards — different design, typeface and labelling to distinguish them as advertising — but demand has grown since businesses have become more proficient with social media. Any company can post a slogan or graphic online, but a printed profile carries weight. What advertisers seek from us is credibility. And credibility comes through storytelling — the thing magazines have always done best. It’s rooted in centuries of tradition, dating back to the first magazine, published in Germany in 1663 and aptly named Edifying Monthly Discussions. From the beginning, magazines carved out a middle ground between news and books: deeper than the daily paper, yet more accessible than a tome. By the early 20th century, titles like Life and Time made slow, premium journalism the norm. By the 1960s, city magazines adapted that model locally, shaping civic identity with the same dedication to fact-checked reporting, literary journalism and elegant design.
Fewer than 10 city magazines of that standard still exist in Canada. Each closure means the loss of a civic voice. A city magazine can both celebrate and scrutinize a place. That is the legacy Edify inherited — and the one it continues to fight for, issue after issue, against odds that grow steeper by the year.
This naturally raises the question, what can you do to sustain Edify?
It’s not my job to sell ads — that’s the publisher’s. She steers the business so my colleagues and I can serve readers, undistracted and uninfluenced by our revenue sources. That said, if you own or manage an organization, the single most effective thing you can do is take out an ad or sponsor an event. You may not get a neat chart of clicks and conversions, but you’ll gain something harder to measure and more valuable: a relationship with engaged readers and the pride of standing behind a magazine that belongs to Edmonton.
But most people aren’t in that position, which is why we’re launching The Edify Readers’ Trust — a fund inviting direct support from individuals, not corporations. Unlike subscriptions or memberships, it has no tiers, perks or exclusivity. Contributions — one-time or monthly, at any level — will go straight to stories that ad dollars no longer cover: civics and politics, long-form features, narrative nonfiction. The more we raise, the more of these stories we can publish.
With the Readers’ Trust, we can pursue this work more consistently and maybe even return to publishing monthly. If you believe in the value of independent local journalism — and the unique role of city magazines as cultural and community artifacts — I invite you to join us in sustaining it. Because without readers willing to stand behind it, there’s no guarantee Edify will see another five years.
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Edify
