This week DeSmog Canada received a 5-star ranking from the international watchdog initiative Transparify for our commitment to donor transparency.

We’re excited about our Transparify ranking but even moreso about the importance of promoting transparency among media-makers.

The production of fearless public-interest journalism in Canada is a rarity. And in our incredibly monopolized media landscape, there is an urgently growing need for in-depth journalism that holds the public’s right to know as a guiding principle.

Happy to congratulate @DeSmogCanada on their 5-star transparency in our most recent report: https://t.co/AjdGCf661m

— Transparify (@transparify) December 5, 2017

But what does it take to actually serve up ad-free and truly independent journalism to Canadians every day? As a non-profit society, profits, corporate interests and advertising revenue don’t play a role in paying our writers and for that reason don’t influence DeSmog Canada’s reporting agenda.

The needs and interests of our readers (you!) are at the forefront of our newsgathering decisions. And our goal is to make complex energy and environment news accessible to Canadians and to shine a light on critical, under-reported stories.

So how do we actually fund DeSmog Canada?

There are three parts to the answer. First, we are incredibly lean with just two full-time staff, a handful of nationwide freelancers and no office.

Second, we are very fortunate to receive ongoing core support from two foundations.

And third, small donations and monthly membership pledges make up a growing portion of our funding. (Check out our donor disclosure and editorial independence pages!)

This past fall over 60 DeSmog Canada readers signed up to become monthly members, collectively funding a part-time position for a new investigative journalist to join our team.

We hope that’s just the start. When our readers step up to fund a photoessay of B.C.’s remote mines or a mythbusting poll about the Site C dam, we are not only filling a gap created by dwindling newsrooms, we’re working to rebuild those bonds between journalists and the society they report on behalf of.

It’s a shared vision of the news we can all get behind. It’s a way for us to maintain our independence as we hold the powerful to account. And it’s a way to combat the growing distrust and disconnect many Canadians feel with traditional newsrooms.

We believe a reader-funded model is a promising way to sustain in-depth journalism in Canada and we hope you’ll consider supporting us.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Why has B.C. become home to Canada’s most vibrant news ecosystem? Credit the wellspring of creativity here — the province’s beauty and potential has long attracted change-makers.

Hidden amid gloomy tales of the decline of Canada’s news media is a success story in southwestern British Columbia.

Here, a cluster of digital outlets have flowered by paying for top-notch investigative and solutions-focused reporting. They are forging new business models and training the next wave of journalists.

Taken together, they form a news media ecosystem in which surviving means competing yet also collaborating. Yes, each vies to break stories and attract money. But they also sometimes republish each other’s pieces, pool resources or team up.

“Coopetition” is one way to describe this ecology. Some day we may look back and see this was the beginning of Canada’s media landscape shifting from being dominated by a few giants – CBC, Postmedia, Bell – to one dotted with hundreds of smaller, diverse outlets more responsive to their audiences.

I founded one of these “coopetitors,” The Tyee, and I still advise and occasionally write for the publication. As an adjunct professor in communication at Simon Fraser University, and in journalism at the University of British Columbia, I’m also co-organizing Vancouver Media Democracy Day 2017.

Consider this a memo, then, to the federal government as it ponders whether to cut that big cheque to save Postmedia or pour $200 million more into the CBC. As someone with a long history in independent media, read this first!

The ‘Coopetitors’

Who are B.C.’s coopetition creatures?

They include: The Tyee, founded in 2003 in Vancouver; Megaphone Magazine, Vancouver’s street paper and website founded in 2006; DeSmog Canada, founded in 2013 in Victoria; Discourse Media, founded in 2013 in Vancouver; Hakai Magazine founded in 2015 in Victoria; the National Observer, founded in 2015 as an arm of the 2006 Vancouver Observer; The Global Reporting Centre, founded in 2016, a non-profit growing out of the International Reporting Program at UBC’s Graduate School of Journalism.

It’s a remarkable list, representing millions of dollars in journalism budgets, a combined staff larger than the Vancouver Sun-Province reporter pool, numerous major awards, a steady stream of high-impact work and millions of page views per month.

Some of the big ground broken in this little region:

The Tyee launched the 100-Mile Diet, helping spark the local food movement, and has reported early and continuously on fixing the housing affordability crisis. With no paywall, it’s supported almost entirely by readers, with some philanthropic funding plus investment from a labour-tied fund.

The National Observer’s energy sector investigations have rocked Ottawa and forced resignations. It mixes revenues from paywall subscribers, philanthropies and other sources.

A Good News Story About the News in British Columbia https://t.co/ytgFIwsIdD #bcpoli #bcmedia #journalism #mediademocracydays

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 9, 2017

Crowd-sourcing Storytellers

Discourse Media, which specializes in deeply reported projects it terms “collaborative,” is now offering its readers a chance to co-own the company as it aggressively pursues growth.

The non-profit Global Reporting Centre, with its mission to innovate how global journalism is practised and to cover neglected issues worldwide, has crowd-sourced storytellers to document the rise of xenophobia.

Hakai Magazine, backed by the Tula Foundation and tied to the Hakai Institute, covers coastal science, ecology and communities. It pays top rates for stories from around the world, and has an in-house team producing frequently viral videos.

A single video interview about Site C Dam published by non-profit DeSmog Canada drew 1.6 million views. It mixes funding from readers and philanthropies.

While these organizations aren’t muscling aside B.C. megafauna like the CBC, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia and Huffington Post, they serve as “tip sheets” for those newsrooms, which often pick up their stories and run their own versions. In this way, the smaller fry contribute to the public conversation by means rarely highlighted.

Collaboration With Traditional Media

Increasingly, too, B.C.’s small independents are collaborating directly with traditional media.

The Tyee has partnered with the CBC on a series about Indigenous education best practices and affordable homes.

The National Observer is producing a major project with the Toronto Star, Global News and others — tracking oil industry influence in partnership with investigative journalism students from across the country.

Discourse Media helped research a Maclean’s magazine feature on Indigenous over-representation in prisons.

DeSmog Canada worked closely with the Aboriginal People’s Television Network Investigates on a Site C piece, and Megaphone is joining with the CBC on a series about preventing overdoses.

What is emerging here is a good news story about the future of news, one worth paying attention to across Canada and beyond.

Less Clickbait Means a Healthier Democracy

As the collapse of advertising revenues is threatening to kill Canada’s major newspaper chains, B.C.’s indies are far less dependent on ad dollars for their survival. And at a moment when trivial click-bait is said to rule, experiments in B.C. are instead pumping out in-depth, public interest journalism.

The net result is a more fully informed citizenry and a healthier democracy.

Why did B.C. become home to Canada’s most vibrant news ecosystem? Credit the wellspring of creativity here — the province’s beauty and potential has long attracted change-makers.

Credit, as well, a backlash empowered by digital tech. For decades, corporations headquartered in central Canada have owned this province’s news giants and their content reflected it. The pent-up appetite for home-grown media spawned upstarts rooted in B.C. culture and interests.

That can irritate some outsiders. Alberta Oil magazine fretted that the so-called “Vancouver School” of journalism was too effectively making the case against pipelines connecting the oilsands to B.C.’s coast.

But feds pondering how to “save” journalism in Canada ignore at their peril the sentiment that motivates thousands of people to not just read but financially support “Vancouver School” media. Their readers are demonstrating real loyalty to media rooted in their place and their values. They distrust big media run from boardrooms half a continent away.

So don’t confuse saving journalism with rescuing dinosaurs that thrived during a different era, when survival sometimes meant ruthlessly assembling a national chain of media outlets sharing the same content and advertisers regardless of local sensibilities.

Those days are gone.

Image: Vancouver. Photo: Omer Wazir via Flickr

Interested in better understanding B.C.’s news ecosystem? Attend Vancouver Media Democracy Day on Nov. 18 at the public library’s central branch downtown.

Most of the entities mentioned above, and more, will showcase their work. There will also be workshops, roundtables, networking and something rarely found these days at news media get togethers — reasons for optimism.

David Beers, Adjunct professor, School of Communications, Simon Fraser University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Canada’s media industries are in a tailspin. As many as 10,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past decade and newsroom closures or contractions are an almost weekly fact of life across the country. In a new book, No News Is Bad News: Canada’s Media Collapse — And What Comes Next, veteran reporter Ian Gill chronicles a decline that is bad for democracy. Then again, the collapse of mainstream media is making room for new, mostly online journalism to flourish. Gill generously counts DeSmog Canada among the bright lights of Canada’s new journalism. Here are a few telling excerpts from his book:

Journalists aren’t easy to love. They are less trusted than police, schools, banks, and the justice system, and only marginally more trusted than federal Parliament and corporations. But what journalists do is important, and it isn’t just the business of rooting out liars, holding policy-makers accountable, probing the public accounts, championing the underdogs, or hounding the overlords. It is all of those things, but it is more importantly the practice of using stories as a way to help people make sense of their world…

Yes, debates happen in this country’s legislatures, our rules of conduct are enforced in our courts, and our commerce is carried out, sometimes in public, often in private, and most of the system works for most of the people most of the time. But not always, and not for everybody — which is why our public square needs to include spaces where we can challenge the status quo, encourage dissent, listen at the margins, and champion new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of seeing the world, new ways of understanding our place in it. We need new places to share those stories in multiple and evolving ways.

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(What upstart on-line media) do much better than mainstream media … is irritate the hell out of people, especially those in government and industry who are bent on maintaining the status quo. Out west, a particular target of the Observer and the Tyee is the oil and gas sector. So concerned is this industry about the influence of these relatively small players that Alberta Oil magazine ran a lengthy feature in early 2016 in which it characterized their work as constituting a “Vancouver School” of activist journalism that industry ignores at its peril.

 “Together with lesser known and more dubious websites like the Commonsense Canadian and West Coast Native News, the Observer and the Tyee are part of an emerging Vancouver School of media that is challenging traditional journalism and finding a ready audience among eco-activist readers. More importantly, their influence is starting to spread beyond the borders of the Lower Mainland, and rallying Canadians against energy infrastructure projects outside B.C., such as the $15.7-billion Energy East pipeline.” The notion of a “Vancouver School” of journalism disrupting Canada’s polluters-in-chief has an ironic ring to it, coming from an oil patch that has been crafted more along the lines of the Chicago School of economics.

But if the Vancouver School has been good at questioning the business practices of some of the biggest companies in the land, it has done less well at monetizing that work. Even less successful in Canada have been commercial attempts to launch new web entities that make a virtue of well-reported public-interest journalism. Flame-outs in that category include the Mark News and OpenFile. One survivor is iPolitics — backed by private investors and still afloat after several years. The Tyee, meanwhile, is hardly robustly funded but has seen success in diversifying its revenue sources and becoming less reliant over time on initial investors.

The Tyee was singled out in “Survival Strategies for Local Journalism,” a 2015 story in the New Yorker, for its “model of diversification” as a route to sustainability. The Vancouver Observer has also had some success with crowd-funding, as has a terrific online terrier focused on climate policy, the BC-based DeSmog.

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Robust, independent, and fearless journalism is essential to the proper, engaged, pluralistic, accountable, and transparent functioning of our democracy. Or, to quote from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, news and information are “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.” 


Canadian philanthropy is delinquent in its almost total absence of support for good journalism, abdicating what should be a leadership role in enabling widespread and effective dissemination of progressive thought in a country that spent a decade being beaten black and Tory blue by Stephen Harper. 


Progressive organizations and forces have been losing the battle for narrative, and the lack of diverse and independent media constricts the passages through which it is possible to argue for positive social change and policy reform. 


While one would like to think that all journalism is, by definition, public-interest journalism, the fact is that most of it is not, and public-interest journalism has suffered most of all from a combination of spending cuts and the ensuing declines in content and competence in our mainstream media. 


Our ability to help shape a culture of innovation, and to advance transformative change in Canada, is hobbled by the narrowness of a national conversation that is constantly circumscribed by economic and political forces that are the antithesis of a transparent, engaged and fully functioning democracy. 


It is especially urgent for Canadians to continue and indeed to expand upon the conversation with Aboriginal communities that was started — but by no means finished — by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 


With the accelerating urbanization of Canada, rural communities — and especially Aboriginal reserve communities — are hardest hit by the service declines in our media. 


A new, Reconciliation-centric narrative for Canada is unlikely to emerge with anything like the moral and intellectual force that the times demand without a media landscape that reflects the diversity, creativity, and cultural complexity of the country, and the many demands of and on its citizenry. 


Existing media tools for disseminating knowledge and practice — particularly in areas of policy reform, and even more when spotlighting social complexity, poor service delivery, and outright dysfunction — are mostly ill suited to the task. 


Our major newspapers, in particular, are in thrall to big business — energy industries most of all, but also developers, finance industries, and other natural-resource players — sectors that, ironically, are becoming less and less reliable as sources of revenue for media.

Ian Gill, who founded Ecotrust Canada in the 1990s, recently returned full-time to journalism as president of Discourse Media, a Vancouver-based digital startup: http://discoursemedia.org/ Follow him on Twitter @Gillwave

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

A year ago, DeSmog Canada excitedly welcomed Emma Gilchrist to the role of Deputy Editor. As amazing as it has been to have Emma working tirelessly to bring the best out of our writers, digging into editing like it’s fun (really) and breaking news stories of national importance, we just can’t seem to contain all of her incredible talents in her part-time deputy position.

That’s why today we are beyond delighted to announce Emma’s new role as DeSmog Canada’s Executive Director.

Most of you will know Emma has incredible talent as a writer and, as we here at DeSmog know, she pretty much performs magic as an editor, but she also has a bold vision for independent media in Canada.

Coming from northern Alberta, Emma is familiar with the local politics of small towns dependent on oil and gas development. But as a seasoned journalist and citizen engagement expert, Emma also has rich insight into Canada’s political machinery and the role individuals, communities and civic organizations play in decision-making from the municipal to the federal level. (If you want the nitty gritty, you can read Emma’s full bio.)

In her reporting, Emma has brought critical insight to our readers across the nation. Now she'll be turning some of that strategic thinking toward building a sustainable non-profit media organization.  

With her new role, Emma will switch from splitting her time between DeSmogBlog and DeSmog Canada, to working full time for DeSmog Canada. But don’t worry, she’ll stay on as a contributor at DeSmogBlog, so you’re sure to still see her stories there.

Welcome to the new gig and congratulations, Emma. We’re a bunch of lucky ducks to have you on our team and leading the flock.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.