The glossy pages of Squamish's celebrated home-grown visitor magazine will no longer grace shelves in tourist information centres across the province.
The twice-annual publication of 99 North Visitor Magazine has been suspended, according to the company that bought it four years ago.Samantha Legge, 99 North's general manager for Canada Wide Magazine and Communications Ltd., confirmed last week that the current issue will be last.
"Our decision to suspend it has been primarily due to lack of advertising support from the businesses," said Legge.
99 North was the brainchild of Squamish's Natalie Pereman, who founded in 1998 - then only 19 years old - in partnership with Patricia Heintzman. Initially published once a year, the glossy magazine offered visitors an insider's look on activities from Horseshoe Bay to Lillooet.
"It had this locals' secret on the stuff to do, that grassroots feeling to it," said Heintzman. Pereman took the magazine to twice-yearly publication in 2000 and increased circulation to 100,000 copies per issue, earning her the Squamish Chamber of Commerce's Business Person of the Year award that year.
Pereman refused to comment on the magazine's history and the recent developments except to say she felt "sad." Heintzman said the pair toiled for years with no payoff but the love of it, and its potential demise is a blow."Nat and I put five, six years of blood, sweat and tears into this thing and, although I haven't been invested in it emotionally for three or four years, it's always sad to see something that you've laboured over for so long not succeed."
In July 2003, Burnaby-based Canada Wide bought the magazine, adding it to its 16 major titles including TV Week, BC Business magazine and the Westworld visitor magazines in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, which had a combined circulation of more than 1 million copies.
"We were impressed with what Natalie had done," Canada Wide president Peter Legge said at the time. "It's a magazine and an industry that we're not as heavy as we'd like to be, so we're attracted to the product."
Legge's daughter Samantha took over managing the magazine and said they "love" it. "When we bought it, we really thought it was a wonderful magazine and we're really committed to it and wanted to see how we can restrategize to make it financially viable," she said.
She added that the company's lack of local connection may have been its undoing."It worked well when it was in the community and we've tried to participate in the community and ingratiate ourselves... We've not been as successful at it as we've hoped."
Heintzman said the company's distance appeared to have affected the editorial content, which may, in turn, have alienated the sales."The editorial content all of a sudden became more of the fish out of water stories - the Billy Crystal going on an outback trip, the city slicker comes to town - as opposed to 'We do this all the time, come and share our backyard.'" Heintzman said the decision to suspend publication means one less spotlight on the smaller communities along the Sea to Sky Corridor."I think particularly the smaller communities will suffer, like Pemberton and Squamish. They don't get the play that other magazines give Whistler."
