I was invited on a podcast this week, and I said no. I told the producer that I was ready to lie down on the ground and die for about a month because I'm so tired. He replied "The final flat tire was your entire body". This joke has been living rent free in my head for days. Every time I think about it, it makes me laugh. This joke is so good, and captures so perfectly my exact feelings right now. But just because I want to lie down and die out of sheer exhaustion, There's a lot in the future that I'm excited about.
Thus, this will be the last post before a two week break! We have some things we want to work on over the next two weeks, and we have to focus a little less on breaking news, analysis and history. Website updates, planning for upcoming podcasts, and building out a bunch of new stuff. There will be no posts or stories on Insta for a couple weeks.
Before we get there, however, I wanted to hit a few important thoughts, announcements, and I have questions! This is the moment– I want you to answer questions to help build up the future of this newsletter. I value your thoughts extremely highly, since this newsletter has the goal of serving you, the reader! I'd love if all of you read this email, as it will outline a lot of stuff.
How successful was the Paper Trail?
First, let's look at the stats from the past several months. The Paper Trail seemed to be a big success. It was a wildly experimental journalistic project. The goal was to expose the truth of the Canadian Continent, to find the Canadian Consensus, and to show everyone in every part of Canada what the rest of the country was like– all while explicitly asking the question Should Canada break up? Well, we didn't really answer that question at all, since it's fundamentally unanswerable. Instead, we presented a beautiful, but flawed country that is falling short of its promise. I don't think most of us came away feeling like we had many answers, but instead I'm walking away with more questions than I had at the start. That's how journalism works.
We had huge traction on this. Over the course of the trip, we had 9,046,611 views of our short form video content. Of the viewers, 32.2 percent were followers, and 67.8 percent were not. There was about 1,000,000 unique individuals who saw these posts. A million Canadians saw the Paper Trail, which isn't a small project. We were honoured to appear on national television to talk about the Paper Trail.
We also appeared on Scott Martin's podcast– an award winning journalist known for his work with the Star, Ricochet, the Rabble, The Maple, and the best of all news platforms, the Beaverton.
We've had some other invites, but we haven't been able to do them yet. If we do more talk shows or radio, we'll let you know.
I've said this before, but knowing the affect your journalism has on people is hard to quantify. So the best we have is statistics and view counts. I don't know how many hits mainstream media has on their posts, but I suspect we're approaching something similar in regards to viewing numbers.
Our numbers on the website are exceptionally consistent. With every single newsletter, regardless of style or content, between 35 and 40 percent of our 5000 subscribers are reading every letter. Every single one. That's not bad! I would love if it was 50+ percent, but We're hitting a little bit above average for a newsletter platform like this. We have another 300-1000 visit the website for every post as well, depending on how popular it is on social media.
In conclusion, the Paper Trail was a huge success. We have almost no new subscribers from it (literally, our monthly income has not gone up or down. We've lost and gained subscribers, and it has equaled exactly the same amount of money as before the trip.) Still, we didn't do this to make money– we did this to make something interesting. We shall remain poor, but so too shall we keep doing strange journalism like no one else!
What's next for us
Well, first of all the Quebec election is about to happen. This is journalism playoffs. This election is shaping up to be one of the most interesting in a couple decades. We have potential secession referenda, we have five parties who could win much more or less based on a shift of 1-3 percent of the vote, the front runner party is an exceptionally weird mix of racism, transphobia, but then seemingly left of centre economic policy (see our article about democratic socialism being innately racist). We have an entirely new set of leaders, who have never debated in public. We have a party who might win fifteen seats who wants to abolish public health care. This is a wild election.
Le Plancher des vaches will be running, our French podcast with Pivot that covers elections and news, and I'll start something in English as well. Plus, there will be many, many YouTube videos. So this fall is mostly spoken for.
I also have articles in the works with the Walrus, and something in the works with Donal Gill, my colleague who I published the article on PR electoral systems with. No buyers yet however. We might have something with Ricochet coming out, which would be cool. We'll see, everything is always fluid all the time.
Afterwards though, we will begin production on Building the Crisis/Batir la crise season 2. I won't tell you what it is yet, but oh boy you'll all like what's coming. I'm also working on developing two other podcasts that will hypothetically replace the news stuff. I'm reaching out to Radio Canada and CBC to discuss it, since I believe they will really like the ideas.
We're also doing a complete transformation of our newsletter types. I personally feel that our newsletter categories are a huge nonsensical mess. I've always wanted to work more on environmental reporting, and I don't believe that Quebec has an environmental publication. Thus, we're planning on changing the newsletters to be three things:
- Investigation/News (paid): A weekly newsletter for those who want numbers, daily news, and updates.
- Environmental (paid): A weekly/bi-weekly newsletter on what's happening in Quebec and Canada with the environment.
- The Weekly Roundup (free): This will have links to every podcast, as well as every major headline from every week! We can't have an email every podcast, but instead we will allow people to have a roundup of all the podcasts from the week, as well as short summaries of every week of news– just like we did before with the Gab and Isaac show. We'll also include any videos we produce in here.
All of you will be signed up to these automatically, and we will launch an announcement when it's all set up. You will then be able to opt out of whatever the hell you don't give a damn about. Don't want to read data pieces? No problem, opt out. The goal is to make things streamlined and clear for everyone. We also want it to be easy as a user to get rid of any emails that are annoying– if you're an unpaid subscriber, you might get annoyed by the paid emails which only show half the newsletter. But you might like the idea of having your news summarized in one weekly spot! We're gonna make this seamless. In two weeks, On the Trail will be even better to use for all of us.
What do you want to see?
My biggest problem as a journalist, and the hardest challenge, is that no one gives me feedback unless it's an email that calls me an incel or something (yes this has happened before.) So, for those highly engaged users, I'm asking your opinion! Please answer these questions, and help me make the platform better for you. If you have problems with the embed, you can click this link here and answer the poll on your browser!
Thank you, and we'll see you in two weeks!