Editor’s Note: The Rover Does TV News, Our Way

As if we didn’t already have enough going on here at The Rover, we’re bringing our fearless independent journalism to yet another platform. Our YouTube show is up and running, and five weeks in, it’s showing promise. 

The Week Is Rover drops on Sunday mornings, and every week, two co-hosts will delve into the stories shaping our lives as Montrealers and Quebecers, going behind the headlines to bring you our indie journalist analysis — the story behind the story, if you will. We’ll also have guests share their expert perspectives on what we’re talking about, always with the aim to bring you the news you’re not getting anywhere else.  

The structure has already evolved over the past five weeks, as we’re trying out different ideas, seeing what works, and figuring out the best way to use this new format. No one knows exactly what it’ll morph into over time, and that to me is part of the fun of this project — we have the space to see where it leads.

Why are we making more work for ourselves? To give different audiences different ways to engage with our journalism. To have a space to bring attention to quality work done by other media. To platform our talented team of journalists, so they can talk directly to audiences about the stories they’re working on in a laidback, conversational format. And frankly, to take our contribution to the information wars to another medium, where we’re not limited to bite-sized videos by an algorithm.

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Our written journalism has always been about depth: we can’t break news often, given this project’s small, DIY nature, but what we can do is offer you a closer look at the big things happening around us. We’re not trying to replace legacy media spaces, but rather to complement them by bringing you a different perspective than what you probably already heard, read or watched at Noovo Info, CBC, La Presse, CTV, The Globe and Mail, you name it. And of course, that perspective will always be from the ground up, aligned with the interests of the community. 

We craved a space to do that, but in video format. Instagram has been a big driver of our growth for the past year, but it’s a platform where short-form content dominates, and most of the stories we cover can’t be neatly contained in a three-minute video. 

Nowadays, most people get their news through videos on the digital platforms they check every day, rather than visiting a news site like ours to read the latest stories. We could whine about that, or we could adapt. We’re choosing the latter. 

It’s been a lot of work getting to this point since first dreaming up the idea in November 2025. We’d been talking for a while about relaunching a podcast after our short-lived experience with The Midnight Choir in 2024, and then Chris had the idea for an even bigger project. With a YouTube show, we could repurpose the video into social media clips, reducing the time Chris spends recording reels each week and making the content more in-depth and searchable than Instagram allows. The show could also be released in an audio-only format, so people can listen on the go instead of watching the YouTube video, if that’s what they prefer. 

We ran the idea by some newfound friends with YouTube shows/podcasts of their own, Phil Cigna of Club Dodo and Le temps des monstres, the latter alongside our columnist Marie-Élaine Guay, and Max Richard with his eponymous Max Richard Show, all of whom made helpful contributions to the planning and execution of what has since come to be known as The Week Is Rover, TWIR for short. 

The studio was designed and built by Chris’ longtime friend, Colin Carruthers, who has experience building theatre sets, and Colin delivered a TV news blast from the past in studio form showcasing our best headlines — under budget, no less. The show has been an up-front investment, but not as bad as I thought it would be, and we’ve called in just about every favour and expression of goodwill we had available to us. 

Fraser Munden and Catherine Dubeau of thoroughbread.ca created the show’s intro animation, with original music from composer Franc Cinelli meant to hearken back to ‘80s newscasts. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the result exceeded anything I could have dreamed up, and I’m especially pleased to showcase quality, handmade visual art at a time when AI slop is dominating everywhere.

We got freelance journalist and Rover collaborator Emelia Fournier involved early on in the process, because she’s got talent as well as actual TV news experience over at APTN, which is more than Chris and I can say for ourselves. She was also invaluable in developing TWIR’s structure, and you’ll see her often on the show as a co-host. 

Chris will be a fixture on the show for the first few weeks and months as we settle into the rhythm and use his large Instagram following to drum up interest, but the goal has always been for it to exist beyond him. That is for the sake of the project’s perpetuity, so it can run without Chris feeling like he has to produce a show every single week on top of his reporting work. Chris belongs out in the field, and it would be problematic if he ever felt like co-hosting TWIR prevented him from getting out there and chasing down the story. Plus, we think some variety in the co-host chairs is a good thing. 

I’ve now co-hosted two episodes, and I’m both anxious and excited to be delivering the news in a new format. I had never really written scripts for TV (or, I guess, YouTube) or used a teleprompter, so I’m happy we’ve created a space where our journalists and I can gain that experience in a low-pressure environment, among friends.

Finally, there are the people behind the camera who’ve been instrumental in getting the show out every Sunday for the past five weeks: Max Richard on the switchboard recording every episode, our video journalist Justin Khan editing everything together, and our marketing intern Celia Poncet, who’s been creating the promotional materials, including all the YouTube thumbnails. 

The Rover has always been a team effort, but this YouTube show is taking it to a whole new level, demanding collaboration in ways we’ve never really needed before. It hasn’t always been smooth, but we’re figuring it out as we go, and the public support we’ve gotten has motivated us to keep pushing to release that episode every week. 

Have you been watching the show? Do you like the format? I would like to hear from you!