The New Voice of Canadian Bodybuilding – With More Canadian Champions than Anyone!

A couple of years ago, Garry Bartlett wrote an article for us called "A Brief History about the Coverage of Canadian Bodybuilding, and the Lack Thereof." In it, Garry gave some details about his involvement in the sport as a journalist for the last 30 years, describing many of the changes he has seen. In a nutshell, Garry has witnessed a significant downturn in Canadian bodybuilding coverage within the mainstream print magazines. As well, he noted that, at the time, his own "Canadian Corner" column in MuscleMag was the only bit of consistent coverage of Canadian bodybuilding that any magazine published.

Now, two years later, things have become worse. "Canadian Corner," for example, doesn’t exist in MuscleMag anymore, even though MuscleMag is a Canadian-based publication. Instead, his article has morphed into a trimmed-down feature called "Canadian Review," which is a small part of their new "North American Review" column. Furthermore, if you look in any of the other print magazines, none has picked up the slack. So, as far as the print magazines go, Canadian bodybuilding doesn’t even exist.

However, I’m not sure that matters much today. The Internet is continually growing and print magazines in all industries are going by the wayside because of it. In fact, readership of these print-based bodybuilding magazines is at such an all-time low, many publishing companies are shifting every which way, just trying to survive. The outlook for the print world is dismal at best and, obviously, no one thinks that covering Canadian bodybuilding will help one bit.

But, since the Internet is thriving, it is here that you find plenty of coverage of Canadian bodybuilding – more than the magazines ever provided. For example, if you look around, you’ll easy find discussion forums, photo galleries, and online magazines like SeriousAboutMuscle.com. What is more, the Internet will continue to grow, so things are going to get even better. That’s why we are very happy to have SeriousAboutMuscle.com as an Internet publication, even though people have encouraged us for some time to go into print. Quite simply, if we banked on print, we would die like the others.

Therefore, our mission at SeriousAboutMuscle.com is to use the momentum of the Internet and keep moving forward with the goal of becoming the best resource for those who like to read about Canadian bodybuilding. The way we have been doing this is by continually bringing on new Canadian writers to voice their opinions here. Moreover, we think that the best people for the job are our own Canadian bodybuilding champions. We already have Autumn Raby, Guy Bourgon, Denis Pedneault, Stéphane Bussière, and Vince Wawryk on our writing staff – they have all won Canadian titles, some more than once – and now we are pleased to announce that big Ron Partlow of Alberta has joined us. Ron is the 2007 Canadian Super-Heavyweight Champion who is featured on our cover this month. His new column, "Super Huge," will debut on November 15 and we know our readers are going to enjoy it.

So, while coverage of Canadian bodybuilding may be non-existent in today’s print magazines, know that it’s thriving on the Internet and it’s going to continue to grow. Furthermore, with more Canadian champions on our writing staff than any other publication has, SeriousAboutMuscle.com is positioning itself as the premier source for information on Canadian bodybuilding. Welcome to the new voice of Canadian bodybuilding – a distinction that we plan to keep for a long, long time.

...Doug Schneider, Publisher
das@seriousaboutmuscle.com

Doug Schneider is the publisher and chief photographer for SeriousAboutMuscle.com, BodyBuildingLive.com, and SeriousAboutFitness.com.