How a Small Newsletter is Changing Canadian Journalism

Before she came on board at The Rover, Natalia Rivero Gomez was pulling night shifts at a bowling alley.

Last spring, Savannah Stewart taught English in Corsica while fact checking and publishing our newsletter every week. Sometimes she’d stay up late going over my piece line by line to make sure I didn’t accidentally get us sued for defamation. 

In the early days of The Rover, I moved into my uncle Sylvain’s place in the country to save on rent. Our daughter spent the first seven months of her life in that house, sleeping just a few meters from the garden where my grandparents are buried.

The reason this newsletter has lasted as long as it has is because we’re grinders. 

By any reasonable standard, we should have gone out of business a half dozen times by now. But we didn’t. Did we come close? Yes. So many times. This year in particular has pushed me into some pretty dark corners.

One morning I dropped Wednesday off at daycare and then spent the next few hours riding around Mohawk territory with a shotgun-wielding vigilante, investigating an illegal dumping scheme that involved violent criminals. It’s weird to be those two people on the same day, the dad and the in-over-his-head journalist. I quit drinking around that time.

Of course, I hate to complain about the journalism because it’s the business that nearly kills me every tax season. You can compartmentalize the knowledge that some gangster wants to break your legs but there’s no avoiding Revenu Québec. Those motherfuckers will freeze your bank account without giving it a second thought.

Even so, this job is worth having a bad credit score and acid reflux.

We get to tell people’s stories. We get to peek inside this giant, confusing democracy we live in and see how it works. Or, as is often the case, doesn’t. On a good day, we get to make people feel like they’ve been listened to for the first time in their lives.

All of us have side gigs to make this newsletter work. But it’s worth it because we also get to be journalists. That grit we develop on the job is going to be tested over the next few years.

When Donald Trump sets fire to American democracy, we’ll get burned too. Pierre Poilievre will rise to power next year on a promise to attack the most vulnerable among us. And while I’m heartened that Quebec voters are finally seeing through François Legault’s hollow political ideology, the only party in a position to replace him openly accepts fascists within its ranks.

Help is not on the way. There is no charismatic leader waiting in the wings. And even if there were, Canada’s fortunes are tied to the declining American empire’s. We share a 8,891-kilometre border with our neighbours and trade agreements like NAFTA have effectively made that border meaningless. We are being swallowed by a country where — regardless of which party is in power — mass shootings, genocide and the impunity of the ruling class are treated like an inevitability. 

But just because they’re winning doesn’t mean we have to lose. 

They win by breaking us, by making us accept the hellscape they’ve created and watching as we fight over whatever crumbs they’ve left us. They win when we stop resisting them and turn on each other.

The Rover isn’t going to save us either — but it can make a difference. 

Our journalism has led to real world change: just three months ago, our investigation into illegal dumping on Mohawk territory shut down the practice and triggered a criminal investigation into two Montreal-area construction companies.

Two years ago, our reporting changed the course of an investigation into the death and possible drugging of Eduardo Malpica. Last year, our news reports were used in an injunction request that ultimately prevented police from putting a pregnant woman and an elderly cancer patient on the street in the middle of winter.

Taken alone, these are not the kinds of actions that will topple a government but they show us what can be done with a little bit of money, a laptop and a community of pissed off readers who want to see change.

People come to us with these stories because they trust us. We’ve outlasted competitors that were backed by actual news organizations because we don’t traffic in clickbait or opinion masking as “analysis.” We go to dark places.

We’re not crying poor. The Rover will earn over $100,000 in paid subscriptions this year for the third consecutive year. Through Savannah’s work as our managing editor, we’ve secured roughly $100,000 in grants over the past 18 months despite companies like Postmedia and Bell successfully lobbying to have us excluded from major funding agreements with the federal government.

But when the grants dry up — and Poilievre will almost certainly see to that once he’s in power — these companies will continue slashing journalism jobs while rewarding their executives with millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses. It may be the biggest recipient of corporate media welfare from Ottawa but Postmedia has lost $121 million since 2022. That’s put their long term debt — which is owned by an American hedge fund — at around $350 million.

For each dollar you spend on a subscription to a Postmedia newspaper, how much is going towards the hardworking journalists in their newsrooms? Ten cents? Twenty? It’s hard to say because so much of your money is going to the vulture hedge fund of a corporation that’s openly supportive of Trump and Poilievre.

When you give us a dollar, a few cents go to our partners at Indiegraf but the rest goes directly towards journalism. Your money goes much, much further with us than it ever will for a mainstream publication. And we get results.

In just four years, we’ve won two national awards, the Medal of the National Assembly, our stories have contended for the Prix Judith Jasmin, a National Magazine Award and two Canadian Association of Journalism awards. It’s comparable to what a newspaper like the Montreal Gazette has hauled in over that time with a fraction of the budget. We’re talking maybe two per cent. 

That’s not a knock on the English daily — which produces vital journalism and employs some of Quebec’s best reporters, photographers and editors. I make the comparison because it shows how a different business model can produce high quality journalism far more efficiently than legacy media.

To keep our momentum going, we’re trying to raise $10,000 ahead of the holidays so we can have some cash on hand for our freelancers and whatever emergency arises.

We are overloaded with requests for investigations and — since it’s just two of us — the extra cash goes towards us hiring strong young journalists to carry the torch. Every time we have to say no to a pitch, that’s one more story that stays in the shadows. 

SUPPORT THE ROVER!

A few notes about the future.

After years of financial instability, one of our readers — an incredibly generous one — has opened her home to us. We recently moved into a West End house that belonged to our friend Margaret’s dad. When he passed last year, she wrote to The Rovertelling us she didn’t want to sell the house to someone who could afford it.

Instead, we worked together to fix the place up and now we have a base of operations that costs us virtually nothing. I don’t think we’d still be alive, as a publication, without Margaret’s selfless act.

Does it mean we’re rich now? No. I paid myself $63,000 last year and we spent about $30,000 paying freelancers. This city has seen an explosion of young talented journalists but their work doesn’t always fit into the mainstream. Our outlet helps get them paid, we offer them mentorship and we try to put their work in front of as many eyes as possible. Most of what we’re looking to raise goes to them.

While they look for more stable employment in the industry, we give them a place where they can earn $0.50 a word and learn the craft from someone who’s been doing it for 15 years. Our writers have moved on to work for CBC, the Canadian Press, Global News, Le Devoir and The Eastern Door.

The rate we pay our writers is unmatched by Postmedia, Bell Media and the other legacy giants. 

In return, they give us everything they have. Neha Chollangi’s piece about police violence in Inuit territory and Natalia’s essay on cuts to Quebec’s francisation programs are just two examples of journalism you will not find anywhere else in this province. When forest fires overtook swaths of Cree territory last year, we were one of the only publications — thanks to the work of Diane Yeung — to get our boots on the ground up there, visiting Cree hunting camps and traplines that were eviscerated.

We’ll be opening up our offices to the general public this year for an open house. We will invite our readers — and anyone who’s interested in learning how the news gets made — to a day of seminars, workshops, readings and maybe a few musical performances. We want to share the tools that make us good journalists with you so that you can join us in this fight or, at the very least, hear some stories about me shitting my pants on a bus to Tadoussac while covering the 2018 elections.

We’ll also be launching two new podcasts in 2025. The first, a collaboration between Isaac Peltz and Natalia, a multi-part series on Latin Americans who immigrated to Montreal and created a community of musicians who use their art to bring a small piece of home to our city. I’ve heard some of the recordings and they’re bonkers good.

The other podcast — a longform investigative series funded by a $10,000 grant — will see Peltz work with Pivot Media co-founder Gabrielle Brassard Lecours to take a deep dive into Quebec’s housing crisis. The pair were in Quebec City chasing down politicians last week. And when I say chasing, I mean Isaac was running down the halls of the National Assembly trying desperately to get anyone to answer their questions.

Join Our Community!

I don’t want to get rich off this newsletter.

After owning 100 per cent of the shares in this company since we incorporated earlier this year, I’m trying to convince our managing editor to take a 40 per cent stake in the company. I get a lot of credit for our success but we’d still be a Substack blog with middling numbers if it weren’t for Savannah Stewart. You don’t see her byline a lot but Savannah is in the trenches every day, hustling to keep us in fighting shape.

Bringing her in as a co-owner of The Rover would allow Savannah to do journalism full time. This will cut into our freelance budget but it’ll also open up new grant opportunities for us.

If we’re going to be successful, we all need to succeed. What’s the point of fighting an economic system that concentrates wealth at the top if I’m going to recreate that injustice within my own company? Wealth isolates us from each other and I do poorly in isolation.

So if you can support us with a few of your hard earned dollars, you’ll be joining a community where you have direct access to the people making this newsletter every week. And that access gives you a seat at the table. 

And if you can’t afford it, please just subscribe to our free newsletter and tell a friend about the work we do. We just want you to be a part of this however you can.

Your friend,

Chris