Kenneth Whyte

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Kenneth Whyte (born August 12, 1960 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, grew up in Edmonton, Alberta) is a Canadian newspaper and magazine editor.

He has been publisher and editor-in-chief of Maclean's, Canada's only weekly newsmagazine, since March 2005.

Whyte began his career in journalism as a sports reporter at the Sherwood Park News, where he went on to serve as editor-in-chief of the paper. He joined Alberta Report as a reporter in the mid-1980s and later served as executive editor of the magazine.

In 1994, Whyte was appointed editor of Saturday Night. Under his leadership, the magazine won more awards and gained a higher readership than at any time in its 115-year history.

In 1998, he was named editor-in-chief of the newly launched conservative newspaper National Post. The paper was founded by Conrad Black to combat what he saw as an "over-liberalizing" of editorial policy in Canadian newspapers. Under Whyte's editorship, the Post attracted a solid right-wing readership, particularly in Western Canada. In its early days, the newspaper was considered by many as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Western-based Reform Party of Canada. The Post actively endorsed a "unite-the-right" movement in Canada, while fiercely criticizing the Liberal government of prime minister Jean Chrétien. The Post under Whyte's editorship set a new standard in Canadian journalism, editorially and visually, though it was criticized for its strident neo-conservatism and British-style blurring of opinion and news. The paper also suffered heavy financial losses, estimated at $60-million annually.

In early 2003, after ownership of the Post changed hands from Black to Izzy Asper, Whyte left the paper in a purge of the newspaper's senior management. He was replaced by Matthew Fraser, an Asper appointee who had been the paper's media columnist.

Following his departure from the Post, Whyte became visiting scholar in media and public policy at McGill University. Whyte is also a member of the board of governors of the Donner Canadian Foundation, and is a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

After his appointment as editor/publisher of Maclean's, Whyte fired several senior editors and recruited a large number of editorial staff from the National Post. These changes influenced the tone and focus of Maclean's, considered by some to be a left-liberal newsmagazine with a penchant for anglo-Canadian nationalism and implicit anti-Americanism. The magazine also had been suffering from steadily eroding circulation and readership levels, largely due to a format and tone long considered tired and out-of-touch with consumer tastes. Whyte has won praise for reinvigorating the magazine, though critics have observed that he has transformed Maclean's into an editorial product with the same kind of conservative voice as the National Post.