Maclean's Magazine

Maclean’s is Canada’s most important general-interest publication: an indispensable source of ideas, in-depth reporting and sharp analysis about this country and the people who live here.

Over more than a century, it has expanded from a trade digest for small-business owners into a multi-platform media enterprise that now encompasses a website, a monthly print magazine and a newsletter. Since 1991, Maclean’s has also produced Canada’s most authoritative higher education content, providing essential information for students applying to post-secondary schools, including its trademark annual university rankings. In every iteration, Maclean’s supplies Canadians with timely, captivating, rigorously crafted journalism about the issues that matter most to them.

Maclean’s got its name and legacy from its first owner and publisher, John Bayne Maclean, a small-town minister’s son turned media wizard. In 1905, he purchased an ad agency's in-house business journal. The first issue of what would become Maclean's— originally called The Busy Man's Magazine— features a selection of republished articles from around the world, including an investigation into American women in business (a new phenomenon at the time), a profile of electricity pioneer George Westinghouse and a work of short fiction called “Pigs Is Pigs.” Maclean renamed the magazine after himself in 1911 and, in coming years, built a publishing portfolio that included the Financial Post , Chatelaine and Canadian Home and Garden .

Since its inception, Maclean’s has reinvented itself many times over. In its early years, it was a monthly cultural forum, publishing work by Canadian luminaries like LM Montgomery and Stephen Leacock and artwork by members of the Group of Seven. In the 1920s, as Canada entered an industrial boom time, it transformed into a bi-monthly magazine with a circulation of 70,000. It grew once again during the Second World War, producing a large-format “overseas edition” for the men stationed overseas (the circulation for that edition was a staggering 800,000).