In the spirit of existential angst now gripping the journalism industry, I paid a recent visit to the future of our trade. The route there took me through Vancouver’s downtown east side, a colorful, Dickensian neighborhood known chiefly for the homelessness on display at street level. Is this it, I wondered, picturing the New York Times’ Sulzberger family huddled on the sidewalk, begging Carlos Slim for a quarter billion dollars – but no, not yet it wasn’t. The future was inside an office high rise, four floors up and named after a fish.
The Tyee is an online magazine dedicated to investigative journalism of the kind we’re seeing less and less of on paper. It focuses primarily on issues facing BC, but many of the stories it breaks are geographically diffuse (ever heard of the 100-mile diet?), making it one of the premier news-gathering institutions in the country.
Though its contributors number in the hundreds, only ten people are on salary, and of those only four were on hand for an editorial meeting on the morning I showed up. Still, enough for a discussion – of themes: “Is California about to go bankrupt? That would resonate nicely with our Olympics coverage…” and tactics: “People are more likely to join something [The Tyee’s communal blog section] that already exists than they are to create something communally from scratch…” and Twitter: “Don’t confuse the fact that I’m slow to Twitter with the idea I don’t think it’s a powerful force in the world. It obviously is – but so was disco.”
That last one is from David Beers, who founded The Tyee in 2003 after the Vancouver Sun fired him for writing a touch too freely about freedom of speech in the wake of 9/11. Now in his early fifties, Beers grew up in San Francisco and worked as an editor for that city’s Mother Jones as well as the San Francisco Post before moving to Vancouver; he has written articles for dozens of publications, ranging from Harper’s and The Nation to Vogue. Today, he pens as well as edits much of what goes into The Tyee.
When Beers left the Sun, he decided he wanted to create his own publication. “I had seen many different business models,” he told me after the meeting, “and what I concluded in the end was that I wasn’t wedded to any one of them. I was more interested in how do I get to do, and help others to do the kind of journalism we want to do. For me it was public problem solving and holding power accountable – those are the pieces I like to do and publish.”
It’s natural to assume that newspapers have been losing money for as long as they’ve cutting staff, but in fact that’s not the case. When Beers was let go the Sun was still earning roughly 15% profits. Compared with other industries that were doing even better, however, that wasn’t enough.
“Management was coming to us and saying you’re not getting it done, we want more profit out of this. That was David Radler saying that, the guy who wound up going to jail [together with his boss, Conrad Black]; I remember that meeting vividly. He brought us all in and he told us we weren’t extracting enough profit – twelve, fifteen percent wasn’t going to get it done and don’t even think twenty is great. There wasn’t one word about civil society or the public good or the role in democracy that journalism plays, it was just ‘this is a business and I’ve got other places I can put money.’”
The way newspapers created those profits all across the continent was to simultaneously fire reporters and create the sections we are familiar with today – Home, Wheels, etc. – that act as billboards for advertisers to hock the same products being featured.
“So what I said to myself when I left the Sun was, we’ve got the internet, we need a public realm to do this kind of journalism, and I don’t really care about the Home section – that’s not me, that’s not my tribe. Someone else can do that. I want to figure out how to conduct this kind of conversation, inexpensively, but in a way that doesn’t exploit people.”
Unfortunately, not exploiting people doesn’t pay very well. The Tyee’s ad revenues account for a mere 20% of its budget, compared to the 80% and up that mainstream publications rely on. So instead, The Tyee – like virtually every public service-minded publication on the planet, including the one you’re reading now – relies on what Beers calls “angel investors.”
“That was my realization: I need to find people who want to launch this thing, who will see its intrinsic worth to society and want to pay for that. All I can promise them is for every dollar they put in they’re going to get a hell of a lot out. Our budget’s not very big, like a half a million bucks, and we put out a ton of journalism. I think we’re one of the main sources now of political journalism in western Canada – in certain areas at least, around the Olympics, homelessness, carbon policies – not everything, but in certain areas we are a go-to source.”
After a wobbly start, The Tyee now commands a readership of approximately 200,000 people, and counting. The tone and style of its content varies with each contributor – voice is encouraged here – but the overall impression one gets is that of a playfully ironic wit. “I have a lot of time for smart-alecky libertarians,” Beers says. So does the public. The day before my visit, the site received the most traffic it had yet received on a Monday, with some 15,600 visitors.
The Tyee’s content has been incrementally expanding apace. Most recently they added a political blog, The Hook, which runs half a dozen 500-word pieces a day, on top of several departments (books, entertainment, lifestyle, and others) and three to four 2,000-word features daily. There are precedents for this – most notably, the American pioneers Salon and Slate – but for a website to run such lengthy stories goes counter to prevailing logic, whereby readers burn out after six or seven hundred at the most.
“If I’m credible with my readers, if that’s my mission, then why am I going to feed you five-hundred-word bits and bites? I want you to believe what we wrote; I want you to think we worked our asses off, we found something out and we got it nailed down. So here’s two thousand words. You don’t want to read it all, that’s fine, I wrote it in inverted-pyramid style and you can stop halfway through, but it’s down there and you know it is; and by the way you’ve read ten other Tyee stories and the last two that you read all the way through there was stuff all the way to the bottom. People say it’s gotta be short because people have short attention spans, but I say if you want to carve out credibility in a world of Twitter and short riffy blog items, go long.”
And you, dear reader? So far, you’re 1191 words into this story, and maybe that’s starting to seem like enough. But surely, before you depart you’d like to know whether the future of journalism is online or on the streets? After all, we’re in a crisis here. Is The Tyee somehow protected by its internet dugout from the forces that brought down the Tribune Company?
“I don’t know,” admitted Beers. “It’s all an experiment. It’s true that it was launched during better times. I will say this though: if it has the effect that corporate media cuts way back – and I mean way back – at that point, the sector of society that needs to conduct this conversation is going to find a way to conduct it, because you can’t just stop that. I don’t know how it will rebound to our benefit, but I don’t believe that if corporate media is forced to abdicate this role that it’s played in civil society while it made a bunch of money doing other things – if corporate media is forced to abdicate that, then I think very powerful interests in society are going to find a way to conduct that conversation a different way. Because they have to. It would be sort of like saying ‘well, we can’t have doctors anymore, the business model didn’t work.’ It’s not going to happen – you figure out another way to get medical care to occur. I think that democratic discourse, watchdog journalism, these have been acknowledged forever as basic tenets of a functioning democracy. You can’t carry on without them.”
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