Gabrielle and I have been nominated for a national publishing award for our housing podcast, Building the Crisis.
The Digital Publishing awards are a well known group, with a good reputation. Alongside our nomination, The Rover was nominated for their fantastic mini documentary, Palestine on Campus, by both the CAJ awards and the Digital Publishing Awards.
If you haven’t watched yet, it’s so good.
When we submitted our podcast, Building the Crisis, we submitted it separately from The Rover and Pivot– not because we wanted to be considered separate from them, but because they had already submitted works, and we didn’t wanna bother them with cost (it costs money to submit) of submitting when they had other stuff going on. So, although this isn’t technically a nomination for The Rover or Pivot, it was those two who funded and published the thing.
That is to say: if we win, it’s their award.
Of course, I’m an anti-establishment indie writer, so why does an award matter?
It matters because you’re the people who supported it. We (the Rover, On the Trail and Pivot) have no funding, no deals, no connections with money, and no interests other than writing. I don’t know if those two have advertisers, but On the Trail doesn’t. We live off of reader support and a grant here and there. Yet we were nominated against the biggest players of the mainstream media institutions.
We’re up against Front Burner (CBC), What on Earth (CBC), Playbook Canada (Politico), Lettres de Gaza (Radio Canada), On Poli (TVO), and Dérives (Radio Canada). Palestine on Campus is up against Le Devoir, Radio Canada, and TVO.
The budget for Building the Crisis was a few thousand dollars from Pivot and the Rover as well as a bit of grant money. It was essentially the money that allowed me and Gabrielle to survive while we made the thing. Meanwhile, The Rover’s documentary was made on a shoestring budget.
CBC, Radio Canada, TVO, Politico— all of them have hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per year– per podcast. They have a staff– producers, administrators, hosts, mixing, editing– they produce their podcasts like a machine. And their podcasts are excellent.
But we still got nominated alongside them.
It’s highly unlikely we win, folks. Seven out of the ten podcasts on this list are extremely well funded, highly regarded machines of content. But to tell you the truth; if we don’t win, it’s not a problem. The nomination is significant enough.
Folks, I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve not been accused too often of “not being a journalist.” Others, specifically women, like Rachel Gilmore and Alexane, get accused of that all the time. It’s a sexist argument. Both of those two are journalists. Someone might not like their work, that’s fine, lots of people don’t like my work. But the fact that I don’t get attacked online like that is because I’m not a woman. Because people perceive me as male (despite my using they/them pronouns), I don’t get attacked like those two.
Meanwhile, Christopher Curtis has big notoriety, and scares mainstream commentators. During the federal leadership debate last year, someone at Radio Canada said that The Rover is the same as Rebel News. Last year, after I wrote one of the best articles about the municipal election, challenging Soraya Martinez Ferrada’s connections with the Montreal ultra rich (Chris helped A LOT), she insinuated that The Rover was akin to Rebel News.
She, by the way, apologized to Chris afterwards. All is good between us, so far as “all can be good” between journalists and a politician.
Chris is consistently attacked by mainstream people. Because they’re jealous and afraid. Insecurity is one hell of a drug.
People saying this about the Rover are obviously disingenuous. Often, the mainstream will copy a story we wrote and not say that it was us who broke it. A major mainstream French publication in Montreal literally stole a pitch that Gabrielle and I gave to them, hired their own staff, and did the story without us.
These types of comments are bad faith criticism. And instead of countering these bad faith arguments, I will instead point to these nominations, I will simply point at our work.
What we’re doing at The Rover, at Pivot, at The Independent, and the dozens of other publications (many of which I work with— little flex) is something that might have a smaller impact, but it’s special. We might never get respect from legacy media*, but we’ll be doing real work with real impact.
*Editor’s note– I have a lot of friends who work in legacy media, who love our work. When I say we won’t get respect from legacy media, I simply mean the institution. The individuals who work there are exceptionally diverse, and often quite radical, as well as kind.
One time I was complaining to Aedan (who has been significantly improving this publication) about not getting respect from institutions. Aedan laughed and told me he doesn’t care about that, he’d rather be closer to the street level. It was at that moment that I realized I didn’t care about notoriety. I might never be a panelist on Power and Politics, but hell if I’m not gonna do better work than them.
That being said, if Radio Can or CBC need an extra panelist— lemme know!
It’s a complicated feeling, one I think many indies relate to. I want the nod from the institutions. Also, it doesn’t matter. Regardless, for me it’s about credibility. It’s harder to diminish our work if we’re getting nominated for national awards.
And by the way, The Rover has won more awards than I can count at this point, so when someone criticises them, it just comes across as pathetic.
1.5 Years
In December 2024, Gabrielle and I launched this newsletter under the name of Duo/Duet. Gabrielle and Christopher Curtis were willing to take a chance on me– I’m not trained as a journalist, I’m a musician. I remember how gentle the two were back when I started. Chris said this about me last year:
“The first time Isaac Peltz attempted to write a news article for The Rover, it read like an acid trip. Isaac took my advice to “get creative” in the story’s opening and went full novella on me, making up a fictional character called Gino and somehow working the term “little bitch” into the copy. I was mortified.”
Do you know how Chris expressed this mortification? He said “You did great, and you’ve got a lot of talent as a writer. Here’s how I’d like you to adjust it. Get it to me by Monday, great work buddy.”
When Gabrielle and I made the podcast, we were interviewing Virginie Dufour. During the interview I said
« ben là qu’est ce que tu dis toé »
Which for those of you who don’t speak Quebecois, that’s like saying “what are you on about, bro?”
Saying that to your buddy is okay. Saying it to an elected politician as a member of the press? Gab laughed, and after the interview lovingly told me I was dumb.
I’ve tried to take the same approach since then. On the Trail is anti competition. We will not shit on anyone else (publicly) and we never complain. Ask Chris, he’ll vouch for the fact that I don’t complain about almost anything.
We will only work to do better and take criticism on the chin. Chris gave me a chance. In my beliefs, everyone deserves seven times seventy chances. It’s easy to do that though, since my mentors, Christopher Curtis and Gabrielle Brassard-Lecours, have given more than that to me over the past year and a half.
Today, I live more off of your support than I do off of anything else. I still publish all over the place (I have many articles waiting to be published with The Walrus, Briarpatch, Future For Good, I just published with Dogwood, etc…) but it’s through your support every month that I can do this today. This year I made a decision that I would focus on this publication over other things. Next year, we will be submitting quite a few projects to awards, and I believe that we will grow a lot over the next six months. We might not get another nomination ever again. But that doesn’t matter.
Any nomination or recognition is entirely thanks to the readers here. Without you, I might be publishing, but it wouldn’t be my full time job. I make, as you can go scope, less than $30,000 a year. Many of you support On the Trail, and the Rover, as well as other indies. Thanks to you, these projects can be made.
Well… thank you. From the bottom of my heart. We’re out to make a difference. We might be the tiniest of newsletters (about five thousand subscriptions, paid and free), but we’re mighty.
This has been a week of small wins. But it isn’t the last week of positive news. I believe there will come a day when we think to ourselves… damn, that was worth it. That day isn’t close, but I believe in it. If I died tomorrow, I know I tried.
The world often seems like it can’t get better, and things are sliding backwards. But we’re gonna keep trying. Because if there’s something that all of us, all these little indie publications, have been proving, it’s that we can change this backwards country one word at a time.