Coming soon to a magazine stand near you ...

The esteemed Canadian general-interest magazine The Walrus is now making movie-style trailers to promote its cover stories, a move one analyst says could help revive an industry that’s “sort of in the dumpster.”

“It’s tough times for any number of magazines and particularly the ones that don’t fit the current sort of (special-interest) formats–and Walrus certainly falls into that category,” said Lynn Cunningham, an associate professor with Ryerson University’s journalism program.

“Anything that’s going to potentially work, hey, try it. To me it seems not a bad notion and it gives something of greater depth than a ‘Coming Next Month,’ or some kind of strictly print or verbal promo.”

The Walrus, which won a leading five gold National Magazine Awards in June, posted its first cover-story trailer online this week.

With slick animation, a professional voiceover, music, sound effects and visuals, readers are teased with details of novelist Helen Humphreys’s upcoming story, “On the Plains of Abraham, 1759.”

The trailers are created by Ingenious Devices, a Toronto-based advertising startup that’s donating its time to the magazine.

The next trailer will hit the site Sept. 14 to highlight the October issue.

The magazine said it believes the trailers are unique in the industry.

“While some book publishers have begun commissioning trailers for high-profile book releases, this is believed to be the first time that a movie-style trailer will be created for every issue of a magazine,” Walrus said in a release.

The Walrus is published 10 times annually by the non-profit, charitable Walrus Foundation and is therefore limited in the amount of advertising that can appear on its pages.

While it claims to have no problem with readership, boasting a paid circulation of about 60,000, it is struggling to lure advertisers during the recession and relies heavily on donations to the foundation and revenue from newsstands.

“Advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff, by as much as 50%, and that means The Walrus is quite literally clinging to the ice floe,” said Shelley Ambrose, executive director and co-publisher of The Walrus, says in a video posted on its website.

Another hurdle is its genre, said Cunningham, noting advertisers tend to want a very targeted audience to reach.

“It is an unusual type of magazine in this day and age, which is to say it’s more general interest rather than special interest,” she said.

“Those kinds of magazines traditionally and for a long time have had a much harder time attracting advertising than say a women’s magazine or a health magazine or a sports magazine.”