SoloJourno

From Masthead Online:

At least 71 new magazines were launched in Canada last year, with 58 coming in the consumer sector, while at least 29 magazines were shuttered over the course of 2008, with another six publications missing in action. This, according to Masthead’s 2008 Tally of Canadian magazine launches and closures.

2008 Tally At A Glance:

Total launches: 71
Total closures: 29
Missing in action: 6
Consumer launches: 58
Trade launches: 10
Farm launches: 1
Association launches: 2
Consumer closures: 20
Trade closures: 9
Custom launches*: 4
Custom closures*: 4

*Not included in totals.

Since Masthead is one of the publications that closed its print edition in 2008, the Tally has for the first time been made available online in its entirety.

We have organized the information using a blog format, which also allows us to update our lists of launches and closures as more information becomes available. The Tally has always been treated as a work in progress and the Web allows us to make adjustments in a timelier and more transparent manner.

For more details (criteria, trends and analysis, by the numbers, etc), click here.

From a j-source.ca post by Robert Washburn:

Transcontinental Inc. announced that it has ended the printing of The Monitor, one of its free English-language Montreal newspapers, servicing the communities of NDG, Cote St. Luc, Hampstead and Montreal West. The 83-year-old paper, with a circulation of 35,000, published its last print issue on Feb. 4, 2009, and has moved exclusively to an online format.

The Alpha Media Group (AMG) has shuttered music magazine, Blender:

The music magazine followed so many other publications into the ether amidst a restructuring at parent company Alpha Media Group. It will continue to live online. “Blender has provided unmatched music coverage and entertainment news in its unique voice to a profoundly dedicated audience of music enthusiasts since 2001. However, given the reality of the current economic climate, we are unable to continue publication,” AMG CEO Stephen Duggan said in a statement. “We are grateful to the sales team and to the tremendously talented editorial staff for their hard work and commitment to Blender.”

A few stats/facts: Blender has been publishing since 2001 and its demographic is young men. Ad pages fell 31 percent in 2008, to 522 pages, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. 30 people will be leaving the company.

From Media Matters:

Summary: The New York Times Magazine is slated to publish a story on March 29 — promoting the controversial global warming views of physicist Freeman Dyson — that was written, not by a scientist or science writer, but by Nicholas Dawidoff, whose previous work for the Times has focused largely on sports and music.

For an article to be published March 29, The New York Times Magazine sent Nicholas Dawidoff, whom Brad Johnson refers to as a “baseball writer” and who has not previously written about science for the Times, to profile physicist and global warming skeptic Freeman Dyson.

Dawidoff, who has published four books — The Fly Swatter, a biography of his grandfather Alexander Gerschenkron; In the Country of Country, a collection of biographies of country musicians; The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg; and The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball — and began his career covering baseball for Sports Illustrated, allowed Dyson to advance the falsehood that in the 1970s, there was a widespread belief that the earth was cooling that is tantamount to the current global warming consensus. Dawidoff also quoted Dyson accusing Al Gore of being global warming’s “chief propagandist” and “an opportunist” and scientist James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, of “consistently exaggerat[ing] all the dangers” of global warming.

Read the full article Media Matters article here. Read the full article New York Times Magazine article here.

After 149 years and 311 days, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on February 27, 2009.