Friday, May 21, 2010

Globe feature asks if Ken Whyte is man enough to "save" Chatelaine

The Globe has an early web release on its much-anticipated Saturday takeout by James Adams on Chatelaine's makeover under the firm hand of publisher Ken Whyte and his hand-picked editor Jane Francisco. And it asks a number of interesting questions both about Chatelaine and, in the process, Maclean's
Certainly, Whyte has shown little hesitation about wielding power – and quickly. Even, as one Rogers insider said, laughing, if it “may sometimes feel like change for the sake of change.” As Whyte himself said of his Chatelaine appointment in an interview last week: “Part of me has always wanted to play in the women’s magazine field because I don’t know much about it!”
and 
Critics of Maclean’s say that, while the magazine is punchy, much of the content is long on sensationalism and “spin,” short on substance. So what will Whyte do to Chatelaine? Of course, one redesigned issue of a magazine does not a new direction indicate. As Suneel Khanna, director of communications for Rogers Publishing, notes, the Whyte-Francisco Chatelaine “is being rolled out as a work in progress.” Nevertheless, this isn’t going to stop some readers from poring over the June issue for intimations of what Bill Reynolds, a journalism professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, jokingly suggested it might become – “a magazine all about shopping from a right-wing point of view.”

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm curious to see what the article yields. Chatelaine has been floundering ever since Maynard left and I doubt the Francisco-Whyte era could be any worse than the Pittaway/Hitchcock/Angel eras, if anything it'll be a bit more readable.

4:00 pm  

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