saturday night returns

In Canadian media news (there’s a phrase that’ll drive the readers wild!): Saturday Night, Canada’s oldest magazine, relaunches Saturday after a several-month hiatus. A few years back, I’d heard great things about the magazine and the writers and editors it had produced (most notably for me Paul Tough, late of Open Letters and still of This (North?) American Life and the New York Times Magazine, which is the closest American analog to Saturday Night at its best).
I enjoyed reading it online, and when I spent some time in Nova Scotia in 2000, I loved it in print. Great, crisp writing, but the editing was just astounding, from story selection to the front matter to layout. Its owner, CanWest, shamefully shuttered it last year to cut costs.
I must say I greet the relaunch with some trepidation, since it’s been sold off to a company I know nothing about, Multi-Vision Publishing. Multi-Vision recently bought up Shift, another former favorite that seems to have lost a step. (Although the economy’s probably more to blame for that than anything Multi-Vision’s done.)
And most sadly, Saturday Night’s going from being a weekly included in the National Post to coming out only six times a year. And it looks like it won’t be available online — they’ve cut staff from 40 to eight, and I doubt any of those eight is web-dedicated. Plus, it’s evidently still going to be distributed solely in the Post, which means I probably won’t even be able to subscribe.
(I’d check the web site to see if subscriptions are available, but the old domain name just returns the cryptic tautology: “The domain saturdaynight.ca does not currently have a web site. As a result there is nothing to see at www.saturdaynight.ca.” Same for Multi-Vision’s site.)
But despite the dark signals on the horizon, here’s to a grand old magazine struggling yet again for breath. May it be as great in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.