Coastal GasLink Pipeline Standoff and Arrests

I'm leaving this note for you here at The Tyee, a place that's trying a different approach to journalism. The publisher, Jeanette Ageson, mentioned that nearly every week she sees newspapers and magazines that seemed fine suddenly going out of business, or private equity funds buying up chains of newspapers and stripping them for parts. She also noted that AI is causing massive drops in web visits for publishers, as it scrapes content and delivers it in chatbots without crediting the original journalists.

Despite these challenges, there's hope for journalism here because of a strategic bet made years ago: that support from readers would drive the future of The Tyee. And it's working. Over the past decade, the journalism team has more than doubled, and they are publishing more work than ever before. More people read The Tyee now than at any point in its 23-year history.

This is all possible because they regularly ask readers to sign up as paying Tyee Builder members. Roughly half of their entire budget comes from contributions from over 10,000 readers. With these growing resources, they've been able to do more, like adding a weekend culture section with original essays, conducting hard-hitting investigative journalism in Alberta, launching a brand new biodiversity beat, and starting a reporting project called Reality Check, which focuses on misinformation and online radicalization. They also have a flagship podcast.

The model is simple: if more readers support The Tyee, they can keep up with rising costs and continue to add more talented journalists to their roster. This allows them to uncover truths that might otherwise not see the light of day. So, they are proving that independent journalism can thrive with reader support.