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Kenneth Whyte (born August 12, 1960) is a Canadian journalist, publisher and author based in Toronto. He was formerly the Senior Vice-President of Public Policy for Rogers Communications [1] and chair of the Donner Canadian Foundation. [2]
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Whyte grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. [3] He began his career in journalism as reporter at the Sherwood Park News and joined Alberta Report as a reporter in 1984, serving as executive editor of the magazine starting in 1986. [4] In 1994, Whyte was appointed editor of Saturday Night , a monthly magazine. [5] In 1998, he was named editor-in-chief of the National Post , a new conservative national newspaper. In 2003, Whyte and several other executives were dismissed from the National Post as part of a restructuring by new ownership. [6] He became a visiting scholar at McGill University where he was co-founder of the McGill Observatory in Media and Public Policy, and a trustee of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. [7]
In 2005, Whyte joined Maclean's at the start of its 100th year of publication. [8] Whyte was named the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s newsperson of the year in 2008. [9] Maclean's was noted during his tenure for its controversial, tabloid covers, including an exposé of political corruption in Quebec that was unanimously denounced by Canada's House of Commons, [10] and an excerpt of Mark Steyn's America Alone, which touched off several failed actions against the magazines in provincial and federal human rights commissions. [11]
In 2009, while still editing and publishing Maclean’s, Whyte also took over the publisher's title at Chatelaine magazine, traditionally Canada's largest women's title. During his first year at the magazine, its circulation dropped below its main competitor Canadian Living for the first time in its history. [12] Whyte hired Jane Francisco as editor [13] and the two of them engineered a turnaround over the next four years. [14]
In 2011, Whyte became president of Rogers Publishing Limited, which owned fifty-five magazines, including Chatelaine, Today's Parent, Canadian Business, Moneysense, and Hello! Canada. [15] At the end of 2013, Rogers entered into a partnership with Hearst, Time Inc., Meredith, and Condé Nast to create Next Issue Media (now Texture). Whyte left Rogers to become the founding president of Next Issue Canada and a director of Next Issue globally. [16]
In 2008, Whyte's non-fiction book, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst was published in Canada, and the following year in the U.S. [17] It was a finalist for the 2009 National Business Book Award, [18] the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, [19] the Charles Taylor Prize, [20] and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography. [21] It was also a Washington Post book of the year. [22] His second book, a biography of Herbert Hoover, was published by Random House/Knopf in 2017. [23] It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017. In 2021, Knopf published The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise, which is an account of the rise and subsequent decline of General Motors and the automotive industry. In this book, Whyte attributes the industry decline to what he believes was an excessively regulated business environment that developed following Ralph Nader's activism for the promotion of automobile safety. [24]
In 2018, Whyte announced he was forming Sutherland House Books, a non-fiction publishing house that began releasing books in 2019. [25] Authors who have published works under Sutherland House Books include author and journalist Jon Kay, psychologist and academic Michael Ungar, author and historian Conrad Black, cultural critic Sam Forster, and the "urban fixer" Joe Berridge. Others include, Jennifer Hosten, Alex Johnston, Trilby Kent, Judith Kalman, Ira Wells, Eric Reguly, Allen Abel among others.
In 2022, Sutherland House announced the launch of Sutherland Quarterly a series of current affairs books by leading writers that are sold in bookstores and also can be purchased by annual subscription.
In 2016-2017, Whyte was appointed to the Canadian government's expert advisory panel on cultural policy. [26] [27] A governor of the Donner Canadian Foundation for more than twenty years, Whyte succeeded Allan Gotlieb as chairman of the foundation in 2016. [28] He is also a director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. [29] [30] He has served as a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, [31] an adviser to the Cundill Prize Foundation, [32] and a governor of the Aurea Foundation. [29] He is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute, a life-time honorary alumnus of McGill University, and a former board member of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. [33] In the spring of 2017, Whyte, in response to Hal Niedzviecki's editorial in Write magazine, initiated the "appropriation prize" in support of authors writing from points of view other than their own. [34] The "prize" was controversial in the Indigenous literature community. [35]
Maclean's, founded in 1905, is a Canadian news magazine reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events. Its founder, publisher John Bayne Maclean, established the magazine to provide a uniquely Canadian perspective on current affairs and to "entertain but also inspire its readers". Rogers Media, the magazine's publisher since 1994, announced in September 2016 that Maclean's would become a monthly beginning January 2017, while continuing to produce a weekly issue on the Texture app. In 2019, the magazine was bought by its current publisher, St. Joseph Communications.
The Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, formerly known as the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, is a Canadian literary award presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada after an annual juried competition of works submitted by publishers. Alongside the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the Giller Prize, it is considered one of the three main awards for Canadian fiction in English. Its eligibility criteria allow for it to garland collections of short stories as well as novels; works that were originally written and published in French are also eligible for the award when they appear in English translation.
Chatelaine is an English-language Canadian women's magazine which covers topics from food, style and home décor to politics, health and relationships. Chatelaine and its French-language version, Châtelaine, are published by St. Joseph Communications.
The Walrus is an independent, non-profit 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.
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
André Alexis is a Canadian writer who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, grew up in Ottawa, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has received numerous awards including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Trillium Award.
Doris Hilda Anderson, was a Canadian author, journalist and women's rights activist. She is best known as the editor of the women's magazine Chatelaine, mixing traditional content with thorny social issues of the day, putting the magazine on the front lines of the feminist movement in Canada. Her activism beyond the magazine helped drive social and political change, enshrining women's equality in the Canadian Constitution and making her one of the most well-known names in the women's movement in Canada.
Stevie Cameron was a Canadian investigative journalist and author. She worked for various newspapers such as the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. She co-hosted the investigative news television program, The Fifth Estate, on CBC-TV in the 1990s. She was also an author of non-fiction books, including On the Take (1994) about former prime minister Brian Mulroney. Her exposé on Mulroney and the Airbus Affair lead to many legal battles including a judicial hearing to determine if she was an RCMP confidential informant: she was not. The fact that Mulroney did take a substantial amount of money while still in government was confirmed in the 2010 Oliphant report. Her final books dealt with the disappearance and the killing of several Indigenous women in the Vancouver area in the mid-1990s to the turn of this century. These murders were ultimately attributed to convicted serial killer Robert Pickton. She won the 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book for her work on the Pickton case. Besides being a journalist and author, she was also a humanitarian, helping start programs for the underprivileged and homeless such as Second Harvest and the Out of the Cold program. For her lifetime work as a writer and humanitarian, she was invested into the Order of Canada in 2013.
David Bergen is a Canadian novelist. He has published eleven novels and two collections of short stories since 1993 and is currently based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His 2005 novel The Time in Between won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and he was a finalist again in 2010 and 2020, making the long list in 2008.
Kevin Chong is a Canadian author. Born in Hong Kong, Chong studied at the University of British Columbia and Columbia University, where he received an MFA in fiction writing.
Katrina Onstad is a Canadian journalist and novelist.
Alison Pick is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her Booker Prize-nominated novel Far to Go, and was a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer in Canada under 35.
Rawi Hage is a Lebanese-Canadian journalist, novelist, and photographer based in Montreal, Quebec, in Canada.
Russell Wangersky is a Canadian journalist and writer of creative non-fiction. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Canada since the age of three, Wangersky was educated at Acadia University. He has been page editor of The Telegram in St. John's, as well as a columnist and magazine writer.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
Heather Margaret Robertson was a Canadian journalist, novelist and non-fiction writer. She published her first book, Reservations are for Indians, in 1970, and her latest book, Walking into Wilderness, in 2010. She was a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada and the Professional Writers Association of Canada, and launched the Robertson v Thomson Corp class action suit regarding freelancers' retention of electronic rights to their work.
Sally Wishart Armstrong is a Canadian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and human rights activist.
Robert Lewis is a Canadian journalist, author and media executive who served as editor-in-chief of Maclean's Magazine.
Desmond Cole is a Canadian journalist, activist, author, and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was previously a columnist for the Toronto Star and has written for The Walrus, NOW Magazine, Torontoist, The Tyee, Toronto Life, and BuzzFeed. Cole's activism has received national attention, specifically on the issues of police carding, racial discrimination, and dismantling systemic racism.
Eternity Martis is a Canadian journalist and author from Toronto, Ontario. Her debut publication They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing up won the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for non-fiction.
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