About Frank

Frank

Frank is a Canadian satirical magazine focused on politics, media, and business gossip. Founded in Halifax in 1987, it expanded to an Ottawa edition in 1989 that quickly became the franchise's center of gravity, feeding on the capital's political gossip. After closures and revivals, it has operated in recent years in print and digital form from Ottawa, with its website at frankmag.ca.

Overview

Frank is a bi-weekly satirical publication skewering Canadian politics, media, and business. Its formula — anonymous, sharp-elbowed gossip and satire about the powerful — made it notorious far beyond its circulation, which peaked at under 20,000 copies nationally in the mid-1990s. The magazine's writers traditionally used pseudonyms; Michael Coren, whose humour column "Aesthete's Diary" became "Michael Coren's Diary" after he revealed his identity, was one of the few contributors to use his real name.

History

Frank was founded in Halifax in 1987 by David Bentley. In 1989 Bentley expanded the franchise to Ottawa with the help of Michael Bate — a former Canadian Press reporter, CBC radio producer, and computer-game developer — and the Ottawa edition quickly outsold its Maritime cousin by feeding the void of gossip news in the nation's capital. Bate subsequently bought out Bentley and his other partners, making the Ottawa edition independent of its Halifax roots, though both magazines maintained similar coverage.

The Ottawa Frank added a "Remedial Media" section printing gossip on the internal politics of Canadian media outlets, and its final page featured a humour column satirizing real political figures — Sheila Copps, Preston Manning — later formalized as "Dick Little's Canadian Beef," a curmudgeonly caricature of an angry conservative Canadian.

The magazine's notoriety peaked in 1991 when it ran a satirical advertisement for a contest inviting young Tories to "deflower Caroline Mulroney." Her father, then–Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, said on television that he wanted to "take a gun and go down there and do serious damage to these people." Bate called the spoof "clumsy" but said it targeted Brian rather than Caroline — and did not regret it.

Bate sold the franchise to Fabrice Taylor in 2003; Taylor moved the headquarters to Toronto, aiming to make it a serious satire magazine, but circulation declined and the magazine went out of business in December 2004. Bate revived it in 2005, but it shut down again in 2008. In 2013 Bate resurrected Frank once more — as both a paid online publication at FrankMag.ca and a limited print run at $6.95 a cover — telling the Toronto Star that the Rob Ford mayoralty scandal and the Senate expenses scandal made it "a great time to be in the news business," reminiscent of the Mulroney era's target-rich environment. The relaunch drew nearly 1,000 subscribers, about 700 paying $129 for a one-year subscription.

Content

Frank's content is political and media satire: gossip items, blind items, parodies, and humour columns aimed at politicians, journalists, and business figures. Its Ottawa edition's "Remedial Media" section made the Canadian media itself a beat — an unusual move that earned the magazine enemies and readers in newsrooms across the country.

Coverage & Audience

Frank's audience is Canada's political and media classes and those who follow them: Ottawa insiders, journalists, and readers who enjoy sharp satire of the powerful. Its influence has always exceeded its paid circulation — a magazine read in newsrooms, press galleries, and political offices, where being mentioned in its pages was an event.

Ownership

The Ottawa edition of Frank was founded by David Bentley and Michael Bate; Bate bought out his partners in the 1990s and has led its revivals, most recently in 2013. The magazine operates from Ottawa, Ontario.

The Two Franks Today

The franchise's recent history has the same bifurcated structure as its past. According to Wikipedia's current entry, both editions came under the same ownership in March 2023: the Ottawa edition is now online-only, while the Halifax edition maintains both a print and an online presence. The Halifax title's own voice complicated the picture in September 2022, when it published a characteristically Frank "death notice" announcing its demise after 35 years — date of death September 14, 2022, "stricken with a rogues' gallery of grievous and irremediable medical conditions," with named mourners keeping vigil as "MAID was administered in hospice." Whether obituary or prank, the notice was pure Frank: the magazine satirizing its own mortality in the same register it used on prime ministers.

The Prank as Institution

The magazine's signature device — the Frank prank, in which operatives concoct an implausible cover story and telephone the powerful to prove how gullible they are — was collected in book form as Frank Pranks (ECW Press). The book's examples are miniature classics of Canadian political satire: Canadian Alliance stalwarts apoplectic at the news that Ottawa is secretly donating Zambonis to the fictitious African country of Chapati; the cronies and former cabinet ministers of deposed prime minister Brian Mulroney canvassed for an "Airbus" defence fund, with all of fifty dollars pledged; and MP Lorne Nystrom reeled in by a caller posing as a Globe and Mail reporter with a yarn about a government grant to press baron Conrad Black for a heraldry course at the nonexistent Cleese Institute in London — accusations, denials and writs followed.

Mike Duffy: From Plaintiff to Informant

The magazine's relationship with senator Mike Duffy captures its method and its menace. In a podcast interview, publisher Michael Bate recounted how Duffy went from suing Bate to later acting as an informant — the libel plaintiff turned source, feeding the publication that had attacked him. The episode also covered the magazine's role in the Duffy trial media circus and the function of satire in public life. It is the Frank lifecycle in one anecdote: offend, get sued, and end up with the plaintiff on the phone offering tips.

The Economics of Outrage

The 2013 relaunch's numbers tell their own story about the satire business. Bate invested about $30,000 of his own time and effort to resurrect the title; the paid online edition at frankmag.ca and the $6.95-cover print run drew nearly 1,000 subscribers, roughly 700 of them paying $129 for a year — a subscription that came with a Rob Ford "bobble belly" doll, the mayor's scandals being the relaunch's commercial engine. Bate's pitch was civic as well as commercial: a healthy society needs a satire magazine. The subscriber base that answered was small, loyal, and willing to pay premium prices to see the powerful mocked — the same compact that has sustained Frank through every one of its deaths and resurrections since 1987, in Halifax and Ottawa alike.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website at frankmag.ca has served as its digital home through its online iterations, operating with a metered-paywall model in its 2013 revival. Its history is documented in its Wikipedia entry, in Michael Bate's biographical entry, and in publishing-industry coverage from Masthead Online and Marketing Magazine.

The site's renewal page — still offering the online edition at a renewal rate — is a small monument to the magazine's business model: a few hundred loyal subscribers, paying real money, to keep the country's most feared gossip sheet alive. In an era of free content, Frank remains stubbornly, characteristically, paid — and its pseudonymous writers remain, as ever, still safely unnamed.