Say Hello to our Managing Editor

Hi! I’m Savannah, a freelancer based out of Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montréal.

I wear many hats, and now I get to add being the managing editor of The Rover to my list of roles and responsibilities. Some of that means handling the boring stuff that needs to get done so that The Rover can keep bringing you the news: applying for grants, securing funding from donors, and setting up a production schedule. But aside from the housekeeping, there are a few projects I’m really excited to take on. 

There’s a lot that’s going well for The Rover, for both its subscribers and its contributors. Since he launched it in 2020, Chris has continued to grow the reputation he first earned at The Gazette for being a talented writer with a knack for long-form stories that reveal something about being human in this particular time and place. 

A year later, he began introducing his readers to emerging journalists whose work didn’t fit neatly into the narrow boxes of the mainstream, corporate media landscape, providing something we really need: the freedom and the space to tell the story as we feel it needs to be told. There are few viable, well-paid opportunities for freelancers, and fewer still when you’re just starting out. I was so excited when he first opened up his newsletter with my piece on renovictions in a rooming house in Pointe-Saint-Charles. It helped me muster the confidence I needed to set out into the world of freelance journalism, an often unforgiving place.

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My goal as managing editor is to build on that success by enhancing the reading and sharing experience for the stories featured in The Rover. I’ll use the skills I’ve acquired in social media design and management to grow our Instagram, making it an accessible space to be introduced to our content and share our work in your circles. I want to bring in more multimedia elements, helping to tell the story by adding visuals, video and audio. If all goes well, you’ll find us showing up in your TikTok feed, too. 

The news in Canada is many things, and one of those things is extremely white. Another one is inaccessible, particularly to people who are not white, born here, English or French first-language speakers, abled-bodied, cis – anyone who is “othered,” basically. It’s important that The Rover be a space where everyone sees themselves reflected. One project I’ll take on, a great idea proposed by longtime contributor Diane Yeung, is to create an essay series for writers from minority communities in this province to share their experiences navigating belonging in a place that’s having a hard time with the notion of diversity. 

As a bilingual anglophone Montrealer, I find myself thinking a lot about language, how it unites us but apparently just as easily divides us. In the post-Bill 96 world, where it may be tempting to some to further retreat into our own little corner of the two solitudes, I see The Rover as a place where we can lead by example to prove that this city’s bilingualism is one of its greatest assets. 

Media is so siloed in this country, the many journalists who are functionally bilingual rarely work in both English and French. We’re taught to believe we’ll never be good enough in our second (or third!) language to be able to tell the story in a way that will make an effective impact on the reader or the listener. That’s bullshit. The only way you’ll never be able to is if you don’t try. 

In the spirit of building bridges, I’ll be encouraging the inclusion of more French in The Rover, through article translations, interviews, and audio and video. 

Finally, I’m excited about taking on the role of resident party planner, continuing to grow this great community of readers and writers we have and bringing it IRL! The Rover is coming up on three years pretty soon, meaning we’ll have to get together and celebrate the astonishing success of this experiment gone right. 

So, who am I? Like I said, I do many things: I’m the contributing editor for the arts at Cult MTL, researcher and social media manager for the Guadeloupe-based podcast Ré·Génération Caraïbes presenting issues and solutions related to the green transition in the Caribbean, and I freelance, in English and in French, in places like Ricochet and Pivot. Besides work, I love books, language, my cats, and enjoying all the amazing restaurants this city has to offer.

Talk again very soon,

Savannah