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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?
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
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
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