Frank Dies! I have watch many wonderful magazines launch and sink. This is another good one down the drain.

TORONTO - Frank, the satirical magazine that delighted in afflicting the comfortable, has ceased publication.

Famous for its gleeful mix of gossip and lowbrow humour, the magazine printed its final edition last week.




Frank's demise confirms the rumours, which had been circulating for months, that new publisher Fabrice Taylor was having difficulty turning the magazine around.

When Taylor – a former Globe and Mail columnist – took over from founding editor Michael Bate last year, circulation was 8,500, down from a high of roughly 16,000 during the 1980s.

Taylor had promised to relaunch Frank with a new focus on Bay Street gossip

Never embraced by the mainstream, the biweekly publication prided itself on reporting stories no other news organization would touch.

One of the main audiences for Frank was journalists, who eagerly devoured the Remedial Media section in the hopes of finding out what was really going on in the nation's newsrooms.

To be "Franked" came in some circles to mean that one had been the subject of an unflattering story in the magazine's newsprint pages.

CTV correspondent Mike Duffy was among the people who sued Frank for libel.

In an e-mail interview with the Canadian Press, Bate said that because of his business agreement with Taylor, the Frank trademark now reverts back to him.

"I believe there's still value in the name and I'm going to spend the next couple of months trying to figure out where the future lies," he said.

Bate also hinted that Frank may come back as a web-only publication, saying that "these are good times to be in the satire business."

The magazine was the subject of a 2001 documentary, The Frank Truth.

The much tamer Atlantic Canada Frank, Frank's former sister publication, is not affected by the demise of the national edition and will continue to publish as normal.

Written by CBC News Online staff