Editor’s Note: Running an Independent Media, in This Economy?!

I’ll admit it — it often feels like The Rover is beating the odds. 

Our output has just about doubled since I started in 2023, we’ve grown our Instagram to over 12,600 followers in eight months, and while we used to publish only the occasional article in French, now we regularly publish in both languages. We also won an award for Labour Reporting at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference for an article documenting the experiences of temporary foreign workers, and we were also nominated for the Online Media category. 

And… we’re not bankrupt!

But between the moments when we manage to stop, take a breath and feel accomplished with our work, there are inevitably moments that really suck. 

Chris and I went through one of those recently. After an election campaign that had us busting our asses all throughout April, we had a backlog of things to take care of. May arrived and we were dealing with hurdles, ranging from minor necessities to serious emergencies threatening The Rover’s survival. All this while running on fumes. 

Even for all the things we’ve got going for us, it’s hard to get out of a survival mentality, a scarcity mindset. Like most independent news organizations, we are one lawsuit away from having to close up shop. That’s just another reason to make sure we’re doing our job right, but it’s also a reality that prevents any long-term feelings of assurance or solidity. 

We were reminded of this reality last month when we were advised to remove a source from a story or face the possibility of legal action. We acquiesced to the request — it wasn’t the hill we wished to die on. 

Growing out of survival mode 

Chris left a stable job at The Montreal Gazette to do this. I had started to consider making the infamous switch from journalism to public relations before he asked me to come on board. Now I have a stake in the business, so I’m starting to understand why Chris is always complaining of acid reflux. I acknowledge that we chose this life, and so far it’s worked out. But at what cost?

Shortly after last month’s lawsuit scare, Chris was warned to back off from a story we’re covering. Without getting into specifics, Chris said the source of this latest threat has “access to firearms and a fondness for arson,” so it’s been a bit of a trying time over here. Threats aside, this speaks to the value of the information we’re uncovering. It reminded us that there is a physical cost to this line of work, not just a financial one, that further impedes growing out of a survival mentality. 

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When we inevitably have those shitty moments, it can hit Chris pretty hard. Though this project has grown so much since he carried it all on his own, he has a hard time separating The Rover from himself. It’s like he can’t shake the feeling that he’s still alone in this (scarcity mindset!). For me, the shitty bits suck, but seeing how they affect him sucks more. We are family, bonded through shared interests and shared trauma. 

The purpose of this column is not to elicit pity or to guilt anyone into making a donation. My goal with Editor’s Note is to be honest about what it’s like running The Rover, explain our decision-making process for our readers, and use our experiences as jumping-off points to explore what’s wrong with journalism today and how we can try to make it right. 

The answer to the question of how to acquire a greater sense of institutional security for independent media is not a surprising one: we need more capacity. Time, money, people, and energy are invaluable resources that we are constantly searching for. Again, anyone working in independent media knows this dance well. 

And the dance is not slowing down. At the recent Canadian Association of Journalists awards ceremony, many independent media outlets were nominated, and many also took home an award. Our friends at La Converse took home two awards, including the award for the Scoop category — an impressive feat for a small publication in Montreal competing against national outlets. 

This is a sign of an independent media ecosystem holding steady despite a tightened economy. Canadians do seem to be recognizing the value of supporting projects like ours, in the age of disinformation and mounting attacks on journalism worldwide.

Funding opportunities — closed to The Rover 

The Rover, IndigiNews, Ricochet, Pivot and others all basically run on the goodwill of average Canadians, competing with the most well-funded media organizations in the country — and sometimes winning.  

There’s also the Google money set to roll in to Canadian journalism organizations, managed and distributed by the Canadian Journalism Collective, which had emphasized the opportunity this deal presented to fund start-ups and independent projects. 

But that avenue is closed to The Rover and others like ours that don’t quite have the institutional grounding to qualify yet. IndigiNews is another independent journalism project missing out on the deal despite its vital work telling Indigenous stories, because of bureaucracy, essentially. We know there are good people inside the Collective trying to change the requirements to make them more accessible to outlets like ours, but we’ll probably be stuck in survival mode until then.

And what about the Local Journalism Initiative, a literal lifeline from the federal government that so many outlets rely on to fund original news production? Will it be continued under the new Carney administration? There seems to be, at the time of writing, no clear answer to that question. Again, The Rover has not been able to benefit from that grant because of our unusual form (and tardiness in getting our incorporation in order). Another funding opportunity that passed us by because we weren’t organized in such a way to be able to jump through the right hoops. 

Despite all this,  we were nominated for two awards at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference this year and brought home one of them, our fourth major award in as many years. We’ve published investigations into corruption and organized crime in the face of threats of physical harm, we put out a podcast on the housing crisis, we’ve completely rethought our social media strategy, and we’ve done so almost entirely on money raised from subscriptions and donations. 

So while it does often feel like we’re beating the odds, it also often feels like they’re stacked up against us, especially when it comes to institutional funding. And we could really use the stability that comes with those types of funding streams to help us move out of survival mode. 

That brings me to the biggest silver lining of The Rover, and an apt place to end this column: we exist despite so many of the conventional funding avenues being closed off to us because of our loyal community that quite literally keeps us going. Over 80 per cent of our funding comes from people buying a subscription or donating a bit of cash. There are few independent media outlets in Canada that can boast having such strong popular support. 

I frequently find solace in the number of times people have offered us support in the form of their time and skills. Géraud Le Carduner translates English articles into French because he believes in the work we do and wants to help make it accessible to more people. Catherine McRae has taken over managing our advertising, which has been essentially non-existent under my supervision. Chris’ dad, Mike, is helping us figure out our incorporation, because God knows Chris and I are very much not the right people to be making sense of that. 

Whatever the scarcity mindset will have us believe when we’re in a tight spot, it is undeniable that The Rover is a community, and it is through that community that we will find the strength to keep it going.

Thanks for being with us this far; I hope you’ll stick around to see where it goes. 

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