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Alberta Report

The Alberta Report was a conservative weekly newsmagazine based in Edmonton. It was founded and edited by Ted Byfield, and later run by his son, Link Byfield. It ceased publication in 2003.

Promoting his own successor publication in 2004, Ezra Levant described the Report as having been the only general interest magazine in Western Canada covering the news from a conservative perspective.

In 2022, the Alberta Report was returned as an online publication under the ownership of Western Standard New Media Corp.

In 1973, Byfield returned to journalism by publishing the St. John's Edmonton Report, a local paper, as part of the operations of the Company of the Cross, a lay Anglican religious order, also co-founded by Byfield, which included a series of traditional Anglican private boarding schools for boys, starting with the Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School in 1957. The minister of St. John's School, Keith T. Bennett, served on the original editorial board. In the early years the school and the magazine operated under the same system where staff lived in a communal apartment block and everyone worked for a dollar a day plus room and board.

The St. John's Edmonton Report combined Byfield's interest in journalism and current affairs with his desire to use media to education others about Christian values. It provided a space for Byfield to comment on "homosexuals, abortionists, human rights commissions and public education" which he strongly opposed. Prior to the establishment of the Alberta Report in 1979, Byfield also launched the St. John's Calgary Report in 1977. When the two magazines were merged into the Alberta Report, Byfield shifted the business model from that of the lay order to a more commercial enterprise to attract a higher quality of journalists.

The emergence of the Alberta Report coincided with Alberta's energy wars with the federal government. Byfield's Report provided the voice for Western Canada's growing sense of discontent and alienation in the 1970s and 1980s. In response to the province of Quebec's call for separation, Byfield wrote about "western separatism". The magazine became so popular in Alberta that the circulation reached a record average of 53,277 a week by 1987. In the late 1980s as the economy of Alberta declined, so did the circulation. In 1990 a group of Calgary oil magnates offered to buy the report in an effort to provide financial stability to a journal they regarded as politically congenial.

The magazine was published for a time in three separate editions, the Alberta Report, BC Report, and Western Report. These were merged in 1999 into The Report, later known as the Citizens Centre Report in connection with Link Byfield's successor organization, the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy.[citation needed]

The magazine often struggled financially, with the senior Byfield mortgaging his own house four times to keep it afloat. It shut down in June 2003. According to the Edmonton Sun, some employees were still owed back pay nearly six months later, and complained when the Citizens Centre was directing money toward its political agenda.

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