The Last Lifeline

Can philanthropy save Canada’s independent newsrooms?

In the fall of 2024, Christopher Curtis, founder of The Rover in Montreal, received an unexpected email. The opening started with, “I swear to God, I am not crazy.” 

At the time, Curtis was struggling financially. He was on his last $20. So he did what many independent publishers do. He turned to his audience. On social media, he admitted that while he would willingly go further into debt to sustain his media project, any small amount would help.

According to the Rover’s 2024 Transparency Report, the publication earned just over $174,000 in revenue that year. Paid subscriptions account for about 68 percent of this amount, suggesting readers trust the publication. But this revenue also has to be split between salaries for Curtis and managing editor Savannah Stewart, the ­Rover’s only other permanent employee, as well as freelance fees for contributing writers. Even Curtis recognizes it’s a measly amount to take home for the number of hours he and Stewart work. 

Curtis was no stranger to asking the Internet for funds. A couple of months prior, he had posted an Instagram reel with the aim of getting 93 new paid subscribers before the new year. As the video opens, he stands with his daughter in his arms and introduces himself. “I’m a journalist, but also a dad,” the voiceover says. 

The camera pans to his daughter, “She just turned two.”

He outlines the kind of reporting the Rover produces —  stories from the ground up, about migrant workers, land defenders, and other overlooked communities — before delivering his pitch. Subscribe because it supports “Canada’s best emerging journalists,” he says. But also because, at the end of the day, it “puts food on [his daughter’s] table.”

As audience members or subscribers, it’s clear we are investing in Curtis’ livelihood as much as the actual journalism. Still, when that email arrived, Curtis didn’t quite know what to make of it.

***

Curtis and Stewart are not alone in their precarity. The economics of traditional news models have been deteriorating for over two decades. It’s no secret that the collapse of advertising revenue across the board has hollowed out newsrooms, forced outlets to cut staff, close bureaus and replace costly reporting with cheaper content, including quick hits and clickbait. According to the Local News Research Project, 414 local newsrooms have shuttered in the last 10 years, while only 174 new outlets have launched in the same period. The Online News Act, which resulted in a ban on news content on Meta-owned social media platforms, has further fractured the newsroom’s connection with its audience.  

And, while the crisis of revenue generation in news is global, the finances of Canadian news media are especially fragile. In 2024, the total newspaper publishing industry operating revenue was around $1.6 billion — less than half its revenue from the decade prior at $3.9 billion. These numbers are even bleaker when compared to the newspaper industry in the United States. According to census data, newspaper publisher revenues in the U.S. were $33.3 billion (U.S.) in 2010, and plummeted to $22.1 billion (U.S.) in 2020. Granted, Canada has about one-eighth the population of the United States. But even after adjusting for population, the Canadian newspaper industry generated more than $1 billion less in revenue in 2020 than its American counterpart. 

It is in this vacuum, alongside practically begging for subscribers, that philanthropy steps in.

In fall 2025, the Inspirit Foundation — alongside the McConnell, Euphrosine, and Sonor Foundations — launched the Journalism Futures Fund, a new multimillion-dollar initiative aimed at strengthening independent journalism in Canada. The fund reflects a growing recognition that market forces alone can no longer sustain the kind of public service journalism Canada needs. With $3 million already secured and a goal of raising an additional $5 million by 2029, the fund’s outlined mission is to offer three-year grants of $50,000 to $200,000 annually to small and midsize outlets producing impactful journalism, especially those led by and serving communities underrepresented in Canadian media.

The announcement of the fund was a glimmer of hope for newsrooms like the Rover’s. Naturally, the duo — undeterred following 81 published articles in 2024 and a Canadian Association of Journalists’ award that same year for labour reporting — applied. Their proposal included Spanish-language coverage for Montreal’s growing Latin American community, expanded reporting on temporary foreign workers, and deeper coverage of what Curtis identified as news deserts in Montréal-Nord and Parc-Extension — some of the poorest postal codes in the country.

For Sadia Zaman, CEO of the Inspirit Foundation, the Journalism Futures Fund is about more than keeping struggling newsrooms afloat. Among other reasons, it’s about rebuilding trust where it’s been lost. According to a 2023 study by Statistics Canada, nearly six in 10 Canadians reported a very high level of concern over the presence of misinformation online. Moreover, only 47 percent reported high levels of trust in the media. To Zaman, high-quality local and independent news is the way to regain it. “If you’re in a northern community, your trust lies in a local publication. If you’re in a community of colour, your trust likely does not lie in larger national publications. It lies in your neighbourhood, in the people who understand your reality,” she says. 

Zaman described the creation of the fund as unusually swift. She says philanthropy moves slowly, in part due to an overall risk-averse culture. “This was a relatively fast launch of a pooled fund,” she says. The speed, she added, was made possible by long-standing relationships of trust between partners. Ironic, perhaps, given that trust is what journalism itself is now struggling to rebuild.

“We haven’t found a foundation that wants to fund the kind of
journalism that we do,” he said. “There’s not like a big Palestine
solidarity foundation.”

For some outlets, philanthropy has proven transformative. The model has worked well for Toronto-based publication The Local. Its earliest work originated as a narrative project at University Health Network’s OpenLab. The idea was to produce long-form, in-depth stories about overlooked communities across the city. Tai Huynh, the publication’s editor-in-chief, recalls early stories going viral among Toronto’s social-service circles before the publication went public. 

According to the Local’s 2024 Impact Report, 72 percent of the publication’s revenue came from philanthropy. That year, organizations like the Metcalf Foundation and the Atkinson Foundation each pledged upward of $25,000 in donations to the publication. Though the total 2024 revenue is not disclosed in the report, philanthropy accounts for at least $305,000 of it. 

This funding has enabled the resource-intensive reporting that has largely disappeared elsewhere. In 2021, the Local published a three-part investigation by Fatima Syed into COVID-19 testing and transmission in Peel Region, where infection rates were soaring and vaccine access lagged badly behind. At the time, this disparity between the region’s population and the testing resources provided by the province was visible in the data but largely absent from mainstream news coverage. In her first feature, Syed showed how a population made up largely of essential workers faced radically different risks and required additional attention. Within two weeks of publication, the Ontario government announced it would redirect half of all vaccines to hotspot postal codes, with Peel among the largest beneficiaries. The series, which was funded by the Vohra Miller ­Foundation, went on to be widely cited and, in 2022, earned Syed a Press Freedom Award.

But not everyone is convinced that philanthropy is the way to go. 

Dave Gray-Donald, the cofounder and publisher of The Grind, has tried approaching foundations but without much success. Part of the problem, he believes, is structural. “A lot of foundations have already picked their media project,” he says. “And it’s usually a less controversial, more…how do I say this? More solutions journalism…or focused on a less controversial topic, like health.” When asked if he could offer an example of such a publication or media project, he declined to answer on the record.

Asked what kinds of stories mainstream media overlooks, Gray-Donald’s response is swift. “Palestine,” he says. “As well as housing, encampment evictions, stuff going on with renters, dealing with landlords.” One of the Grind’s most-read pieces covered a 2024 pro-Palestine protest as it passed outside Mount Sinai Hospital. The feature, written by Gray-Donald himself, is an excellent example of hyperlocal, on-the-ground reporting as it follows the steps of roughly 2,000 protesters to reveal how a routine march was distorted into a national controversy. The feature pieces together firsthand observations and social media footage to counter the wave of misinformation circulated by politicians and major media outlets in the aftermath of the protest. 

Soon after publication of this feature, the paper noticed an increase in engagement. It offered a factual reconstruction of events and validated the voice of those calling for Palestinian liberation. The paper had earned what any respectable journalism outlet strives for: public trust. On the heels of this engagement, when the Grind asked readers to help raise $10,000 to print its next issue, the target was met within days. In fact, even when the publication first started in 2022, it managed to raise about $40,000 from the public just before launch.

And yet, of course, “$40,000 isn’t enough to start a publication,” Gray-Donald says. A later campaign this past summer to raise $7,000 barely cleared $2,000. Such is the Sisyphean task of running a local news publication. Gray-Donald says that each issue costs around $20,000 to produce, including printing, design, distribution, contributor pay, and a small amount for editing. There are no salaries. Though there are part-time hires and contract editors, Gray-Donald hasn’t paid himself since founding the paper, and has loaned the publication money from his own savings for startup. “On the core team of people who are involved, some of us are going into debt…like personal debt, to keep the publication alive.” Yet, like Curtis, he continues publishing, even in times of financial distress. 

Still, Gray-Donald is careful not to dismiss philanthropy altogether. He senses a moment opening. “A lot of those bigger foundations and individuals want to give to journalism, but don’t know how,” he says. The problem, as he sees it, is that there was never a strong philanthropic support network built for publications like his. In Toronto in particular, he adds, there isn’t much of a tradition of people donating to alt-weekly, free print ­publications.

“We haven’t found a foundation that wants to fund the kind of journalism that we do,” he says. Additionally, “There’s not like a big Palestine solidarity foundation.”

***

In December 2025, Curtis ultimately learned that the Rover had not passed the first round of decisions for the coveted Journalism Futures Fund. Upon reflection, Curtis believes its application did not adequately include how the grant would contribute to what funders call “capacity building.” In the language of philanthropy, capacity building refers less to stories than to systems. They needed to illustrate how they would use the money to grow the operation, measure impact, and sustain the publication over time. It is the difference between funding journalism as a series of articles and funding journalism as an organization. 

“Journalism is a public good, and like any public good, it needs
to be supported from multiple sources.”

“We just thought the pitch will be so good it won’t matter,” he says. “But there’s rules for a reason.”

Two months later, in February 2026, the Inspirit Foundation announced the fund’s six inaugural winners: Cabin Radio in the Northwest Territories, La Converse and The Eastern Door in Quebec, The Green Line in Ontario, The Independent in Newfoundland and Labrador, and IndigiNews in British Columbia.

For these publications, philanthropy will serve as a stabilizing force. For example, in the announcement press release, the Independent said the funds would allow the publication to hire a publisher to expand its reach. The hope is that it also sets a precedent, encouraging other foundations to follow suit and invest in journalism quickly enough to make a difference to its long-term survival. 

But even its architects acknowledge the limits. At Inspirit, Zaman believes opportunities like the Journalism Futures Fund can “de-risk” journalism by supporting ­experimentation and innovation that government or market-based models can’t. But she’s clear-eyed about scale. “Even if all the money in philanthropy in Canada went into journalism, it’s still a drop in the bucket,” she says. “Journalism is a public good, and like any public good, it needs to be supported from multiple
sources.”

Moreover, even the amount of philanthropy funding available for journalism in Canada remains modest, says Zaman. A  $3 million investment in local news feels minuscule when just south of the border, the Knight Foundation, Press Forward, and the MacArthur Foundation collectively invested upwards of $84.2 million (U.S.) toward various journalism projects in 2025.

Curtis shrugs off the rejection. Even without the funding, he believes his audience-funded model is better than any alternative. In fact, each of the independent newsroom leaders I spoke to for this feature shared a resolute belief in their work. With or without funding, they believe that the hustle will pay off, that their projects are moral imperatives, that the stories they publish would not exist anywhere else.

He returns to the email he had received in 2024 from an unknown woman. “I swear to God I am not crazy…” it read. The sender wrote that she had been following Curtis’s work since his time at the Montreal Gazette and that she just wanted to help. But instead of a donation, she offered him, of all things, her late father’s house to live in, rent-free. 

“I didn’t ever do anything for this person,” Curtis says. “Like none of my investigations had anything to do with her.”

And yet. It’s a three-bedroom house with two floors and a basement located in a neighbourhood inhabited almost entirely by “white guys who work in finance,” Curtis says. In other words, it’s the kind of place that would otherwise be financially out of reach for an independent publisher running solely on subscriptions and stubbornness.

He double-, triple- and quadruple-checked with this stranger before finally accepting her generosity. Not only does Curtis live here with his family, but the house now also doubles as the Rover’s office space. He tells me that when friends of the paper are in town, they stay at the house. All of their holiday parties happen there. So do many of their planning and training sessions. “We treat this like a kind of refuge for people in the city,” Curtis says.

All because one reader decided that the Rover’s survival mattered.

“They’re bigger than we are, for sure,” he says of legacy media. “But their world is shrinking, and ours is growing.”

Legacy media could never be so lucky.