Saying he can't make a financial go of it in an era of free political blogs, publisher Michael Bate says he is shutting down both Frank magazine and efrank.ca, its online counterpart.
First published in 1989, Frank had its heyday during the early 1990s, when circulation was around 16,000 and the magazine was passed from desk to desk in Ottawa. ...
Ottawa's media circuit “was a gentleman's club in the early nineties and I think we wrote about subjects that were taboo,” Mr. Bate said. “In a way, we were the Internet then.”
The magazine folded in December, 2004, before returning to life three years ago as efrank.ca.
The magazine has been sued more than 100 times and was the subject of a feature-length documentary that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001.
Bate said Frank did break stories over the years without being credited by the MSM that eventuallypicked them up.
And what would Mr. Bate pick as a modern-day highlight?
Most recently, Frank provided wall-to-wall coverage of reporter Krista Erickson's career woes with CBC's parliamentary bureau and her personal relationship with Conservative MP Lee Richardson.
“Nobody was covering that and I think it's an interesting story,” Mr. Bate said Tuesday in an interview. “It's a commentary on the media and how it operates.”
The CP story doesn't mention the short tenure of one Fabrice Taylor as Frank's proprietor.
The Report on Business columnist took it off Bate's hands in 2003. The two initially tried working together, but Bate soon split.
Fabrice tried to make Frank more credible, using some technique called reporting as a way to find out if something was true. Bate had the the more flexible standard of going with something if it had the ring of truth (did I mention that Frank has been sued -- in fact, more than once?)
Taylor started with an uncredible, amusing 7,500-circ gossip mag and managed to turn it into a slightly-more-credible, vastly-less-amusing 2,500-circ gossip mag. He left in September 2004 before it fully collapsed.
But to put that in perspective, Frank sold 16,000 copies during its early 1990s heyday.
Here's an excerpt of a Nov. 12, 2005 Ryerson Review of Journalism article -- The Ballad of Electronic Frank:
Frank currently has 800 subscribers paying $9.95 a month, and needs 2,500 to break even. Simply subscribing presents its own concerns for readers. Because of its reputation, many potential readers are worried about being seen with the magazine for fear of being pegged as an informant.
And some people made a big show of saying they never read Frank. However, during my tenure at one national newspaper, I watched in astonishment one day as a very senior editor grabbed a fresh-off-the-newsstand Frank that was peeking out of my briefcase. He apologized for the act, but then said, "I don't want to be scooped."* :)
* Wow. So when the decision-makers have to read Frank to know what's going on, what does that say about us little people? :)
Frank has been around for almost as long as I've been a journalist. When it lived up to its motto of mocking the greedy and provoking the powerful, it was great. When it contributed to the fucking over of basically innocent or harmless people, it sucked.
I've heard of at least one basically decent editor who was devastated by some vicious, bitter underling's constant attacks on her that made it into Frank. That's not right.
But in a strange way, if Frank truly is gone forever, I'll miss the little rag. There was a place for it in Canada's media ecosystem. Unfortunately, the niche couldn't be filled at a profit.