Editor’s Note: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

A few weeks ago, we finally sent out our 2024 Transparency Report to everyone on our mailing list.

A little late in the game, I’ll admit — but better late than never! It was a classic instance of everything timelier taking precedence, until grant application season came and we needed one. For 2025, I do want to make sure to get it out in the springtime, so you won’t have to wait so long before having something to compare 2024 to.

Link to view the 2024 Transparency Report

2024 Income 

It was another year of clearing over $100,000 in memberships and donations, which is an achievement all unto itself.

Add to that $55,000 in grants, and our revenue totalled $174,010 for the year, showing steady growth from our 2023 revenue of $126,285.

We got three grants in 2024: $10,000 from the Association des journalistes indépendants du Québec, which funded Chris’ deep dive into the justice system in Quebec, plus $45,000 from our partners at Indiegraf, a company providing support to independent media outlets. The third one, a direct-to-journalists grant offered by Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), funded the salaries of two journalism Fellows who worked for us for the second half of 2024 — Neha Chollangi and Natalia Rivero Gómez, both of whom returned for a second year under the JHR grant in 2025.

2024 Expenses 

The biggest expense was Chris — he took in just over $63,000 for the year, roughly the same as the previous year. The next-largest line item is our operating costs at $38,922: gas, Chris’ rent, meals and accommodation on the road, tools and supplies, etc. Next is the freelancers’ pay of $31,465. My pay is included in that and probably accounts for about half of it. As of 2025, I’m a full-time employee of The Rover, and the next income sheet will reflect that change.

Finally, the Sales Tax line item was, admittedly, the result of poor business practice. We delayed getting incorporated and setting up a dedicated bank account for The Rover until Chris was slapped with a tax bill that almost put us out of business. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was the kick in the ass that got us organized, lest we ever have a repeat of those dark days. 

Altogether, our 2024 expenses totalled $151,312, leaving $22,698 in surplus, which was reinvested in The Rover for 2025. 

Support your local indie journalists

Bringing 2025 to an end 

We’ll have more to say once we complete the 2025 Transparency Report, sometime in the spring of 2026 — I promise. But for now, I’m just proud that the team has grown, that we’ve begun producing video content in earnest, and that we somehow managed to produce our first-ever documentary. 

Topping out our list of achievements is the addition of another award to our trophy cabinet, and for the first time, it was for work by someone other than Chris. Natalia, one of the JHR-funded journalism Fellows, took home the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Gold Award for Labour Reporting for her report on working conditions in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Natalia will go down in the annals of our history as a true Rover, an immigrant who won an award writing in her second language. That’s the underdog spirit of this publication. 

For me, 2024 ended with accepting Chris’ offer to join him as co-owner of The Rover, therefore letting this chaos even deeper into my life. And 2025 now ends with surprising calm. 

I’m reassured, looking back at the bases we’ve set for ourselves, realizing what a solid foundation we’ve laid for the next steps of this project. This is the first time we’re actually organized enough to take a full two weeks off, with all the holiday content already edited and scheduled. Now all that’s left to do is rest for the big year ahead.

Plans for 2026 

Without further ado, and in a naked attempt to drum up support and interest for the next year, here’s what we’ve got cooking for 2026: 

Increasing ad revenue 

As it stands, we’ve got the infrastructure to host ads on our website; we just don’t have the bandwidth to solicit them. That said, advertising is easily the funding stream with the most potential in the new year (with the starting point being $0, there’s lots of room for growth!). We’ve been approached by a local content creator who produces Instagram Reels ads and has made us an interesting revenue-sharing proposal. 

Max Richard, comedian, podcaster, and one-time Hawkesbury local reporter, is offering to produce ads on his own platforms for companies that would pay The Rover directly for his services. It is shaping up to be an ideal situation for both Max and us: the advertising would be handled by someone who is not involved in editorial decisions, wecan pool resources and thereby cut costs, these Instagram ads wouldn’t actually appear on The Rover’s platforms, and the advertisers get to say that they support independent local journalism, which (we’d like to believe) is a sell to companies with a community focus.

The main goal is to generate more funding, fast, for our 2026 projects (keep reading to find out more), allowing us to scale up in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we relied solely on building reader revenue. 

We are also thinking about how critical it is to maintain our editorial independence, which is our main concern as we work out exactly how we’ll go about this. Luckily, we have such strong popular support; advertising will never be our main source of funding — that will always be our reader base, which makes it much easier to turn away companies we don’t feel align with our values. We also commit to transparency by making our list of advertisers public, along with specific contribution amounts.

Anyway, check Max out. Chris and I have appeared twice on his podcast, I’ve become a regular listener, and he’s crazy about The Rover. He’s one of us, now.

A YouTube show 

Picture this: a weekly news show bringing you stories from Montreal and across Quebec, talking to The Rover’s journalists about their reporting, with guest interviews, and some regular cultural segments. You can watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on a podcast streaming app if you’re on the go. It’ll even be in French sometimes, because, well, you know why. 

We still need to iron out a lot of the details — like the name. But we have space in the basement for a studio, and the main thing we’ve learned in the aftermath of our Instagram success is that there’s a real hunger for the kind of news content we’re putting on the table. And, we want to go more in-depth than that medium allows. 

Hopefully, we manage to get that project off the ground by summer, so people won’t have to wait too long now that I’ve written this idea into existence for everyone. On our end, we’re really excited.

More multimedia content 

We are coming to terms with the fact that people simply do not want to read like they used to. That’s just as well — it challenges us to embrace new media and think of different ways to tell stories. That’s part of the impetus for the YouTube show: to repackage our content into a format that people prove, through their consumption habits, they prefer. 

We’ve got a few other projects in the works. Justin Khan and I are hard at work on our second documentary, which is shaping up to be bigger and more ambitious than Palestine on Campus. I’m sincerely hoping it’ll be released in the fall of 2026, but all we know for sure is that anything involving video takes longer than you’d like, so who knows. 

We also have Natalia working on a podcast exploring the Latin American music scene in Montreal. What we’ve heard so far is oozing with rhythm, so that should be a good one. 

That’s about all I can share at this point. We’re so excited for all that 2026 has in store for us. See you on the other side of a well-deserved holiday.

Happy New Year,

Savannah

Did you like this column? Share it with a friend!