The Walrus is an independent, nonprofit Canadian media organization. It is multi-platform and produces an eight-issue-per-year magazine and online editorial content that includes current affairs, fiction, poetry, and podcasts, a national speaker series called The Walrus Talks, and branded content for clients through The Walrus Lab.
History
Creation
In 2002, David Berlin, a former editor and owner of the Literary Review of Canada, began promoting his vision of a world-class Canadian magazine. This led him to meet with then-Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham to discuss creating a "Harper's North", which would combine the American magazine with 40 pages of Canadian content. As Berlin searched for funding to create that content, a mutual friend put him in touch with Ken Alexander, a former high school English and history teacher and then senior producer of CBC Newsworld's CounterSpin. Like Berlin, Alexander was hoping to found an intelligent Canadian magazine that dealt with world affairs.
Before long, the Chawkers Foundation, run by Alexander's family, agreed to give the prospective magazine $5 million over five years, and the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation promised $150,000 for an internship program. This provided enough money to get by without the partnership with Harper's.
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Name
The "walrus" name was a working title at first, but it quickly grew on the magazine's staff. According to its website, the rationale for it was "to dissociate this country with the 'log chomping' and 'earnestness' of our national animal (and cliché), the beaver"; the walrus, just as native to Canada, is "curmudgeonly but clever, bulky but agile (if only in water)."
Magazine
Berlin resigned as editor in 2004; Alexander ended his tumultuous reign as publisher, then editor, in 2008. John Macfarlane, former editor-in-chief of Toronto Life and publisher of Saturday Night, joined The Walrus in 2008 as editor and co-publisher. With newly returned art director Brian Morgan, Macfarlane oversaw a revamping of the editorial and art direction of the magazine. The new Walrus was to be more consistent and current, with a "far more internally driven" process for story selection, and the reworked cover featuring illustrations that corresponded to each issue's content.
The Walrus soon began to receive critical acclaim: its two 2003 issues alone garnered 11 National Magazine Award nominations and three wins, and the Utne Reader awarded it the prize for best new publication in 2004. In 2006, it won the National Magazine Award for Magazine of the Year in Canada. As of 2017, it has consistently led in the National Magazine Awards, with 70 wins and 231 nominations. The two companies planned to create more documentaries in the future.
Unpaid internship programme
In 2014, The Walrus was required to shut down its unpaid internship programme after the Ontario Ministry of Labour declared that its longstanding practice of not paying interns contravened the Employment Standards Act. The magazine issued a statement justifying its practice of using unpaid labour, saying:
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We have been training future leaders in media and development for ten years, and we are extremely sorry we are no longer able to provide these opportunities, which have assisted many young Ontarians—and Canadians—in bridging the gap from university to paid work and in, many cases, on to stellar careers.
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In 2014, The Walrus began offering paid six-month editorial fellowships. In 2020, the fellowships grew to one year.
December 2014–present
On 1 December 2014, Jonathan Kay replaced Macfarlane as editor-in-chief.
In October 2015, a report in Canadaland detailed a toxic and disorganised environment at the magazine.
Kay resigned on 14 May 2017 following a controversy about cultural appropriation in which he dismissed Indigenous concerns about the practice. Jessica Johnson was named executive editor, in addition to her existing role as creative director, on 7 September 2017.
Johnson resigned on 2 February 2023, saying, "five years is a long time in the life of a magazine editor, and I've had a really good run." Carmine Starnino, editor-at-large at The Walrus and a founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine, stepped up as interim editor-in-chief no later than 21 February.
Finances
Though The Walrus was initially pledged $1 million annually by the Chawkers Foundation for its first five years, it was unable to access this money without first being recognized as a charitable organisation by the Canada Revenue Agency. The Alexander family was forced to support the magazine out of its own pocket until it finally received charitable status in 2005, creating the charitable nonprofit Walrus Foundation. In addition to publishing the magazine, the Foundation runs events across Canada, including talks and debates on public policy.
In the relatively small yet geographically large Canadian market, magazines producing long-form journalism have often struggled to stay afloat. Saturday Night, which The Walrus editor John Macfarlane formerly published, lost money continuously despite being a celebrated publication. But as Macfarlane reported in 2011, The Walruss charitable model, similar to that of Harper's, was thus far sustaining it: donations covered about half of the costs of producing the magazine in 2010, with the traditional revenue streams of circulation and advertising providing the rest.