Juno News - How independent media is growing while legacy media is dying

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.460 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:13.400 Hello and welcome to you all, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:18.220 Here, the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:20.700 It is Thursday, November 30th, the last day of November.

00:00:25.280 I know December is already upon us.

00:00:28.240 I've been trying to avoid doing, actually I haven't been avoiding,

00:00:30.760 I've been like rubbing it in your faces every day with the like Christmas countdown,

00:00:34.480 where now I guess that means that 25 days to Christmas.

00:00:36.660 So the good news is you've got a weekend coming up,

00:00:38.840 you can get some early Christmas shopping done if that's what you are doing.

00:00:42.220 Although, based on that discussion we had a couple of weeks ago

00:00:45.460 with the Canadian Human Rights Commission saying that it is discriminatory to honor Christmas,

00:00:50.660 I suppose you should just like all start typing away to get your human rights complaint filed.

00:00:54.940 I'll have to rush through the show so that we can finish things up

00:00:58.340 before they take us off the air once and for all.

00:01:00.580 But we are standing firm and standing defiant.

00:01:03.460 And just to insulate myself a little bit from your calls for cancellation,

00:01:07.300 I figured we'd bring in the boss herself. 1.00

00:01:09.380 My colleague, Candice Malcolm, who you haven't seen as much of in the last couple of years,

00:01:13.380 she's been tending to a very significant role,

00:01:16.380 I'd say probably the most important role, being a mother.

00:01:19.180 But she has returned with a bang.

00:01:21.740 The Candice Malcolm show is back at True North.

00:01:24.100 And I thought what better way to celebrate it than bringing Candice Malcolm herself back

00:01:27.940 on the Andrew Lawton show.

00:01:29.620 Candice, good to talk to you and welcome back.

00:01:32.280 Thank you so much for that introduction, Andrew.

00:01:33.820 It's great to be here.

00:01:34.700 And I just have to say that I've enjoyed True North's coverage while I've been away.

00:01:37.900 I've enjoyed the Andrew Lawton show so much.

00:01:39.760 Literally, that's the way that I would stay in touch with what was going on in the outside world.

00:01:43.340 I would get my news exclusively from True North.

00:01:45.420 And I really, I really think you guys have done a great job in my absence.

00:01:48.180 So thank you for that.

00:01:49.540 Well, I'm very glad.

00:01:50.720 And obviously, I mean, we were in touch over that time.

00:01:53.040 And I think we chatted at the Albany Club whenever that was.

00:01:56.200 And everyone was so happy to see you back.

00:01:58.220 But let me just first ask you, how blissful has it been to not have CBC as part of your news diet?

00:02:05.160 Because on one hand, I'm like flattered.

00:02:06.400 OK, Ashley's paying attention to my show.

00:02:08.160 But on the other hand, it's like I hear people that get their news only from legacy media sources.

00:02:12.740 And I can't imagine their mental health is all that good.

00:02:14.960 Yeah, I was definitely one of those people for many years, Andrew.

00:02:18.280 But I sort of took a unique opportunity, I guess, during my maternity leave.

00:02:22.020 I decided to basically unplug from social media, from the sort of digital landscape that we are so attached to.

00:02:29.660 And I mean, it's a little ironic given that I am a, you know, the founder and the owner of this company that is a digital media platform.

00:02:37.080 And so much of the way that we reach Canadians is through these new non-traditional distribution channels like social media.

00:02:43.240 But for me personally, it was almost just like a mental health break.

00:02:46.320 Like I got off of Twitter, off of Facebook, off of Instagram.

00:02:49.340 I deleted all those apps from my phone.

00:02:51.740 And the only way that I was really getting news was through email.

00:02:54.280 So I subscribed to a few different newsletters.

00:02:57.200 True North being obviously my favorite, but also just a really good source of news.

00:03:00.620 And I think definitely for me during that time, like being, spending time with my kids, spending time face-to-face with them, not always being on a device, grabbing my phone.

00:03:09.820 Most of the time I didn't even have my phone like on the same floor of the house with me.

00:03:13.300 And it was really nice.

00:03:14.620 It was kind of a good reset.

00:03:16.720 And, you know, it was almost hard for me to get back into it.

00:03:19.340 Like I just finally started downloading these apps back onto my phone and kind of getting sucked back into, you know, the doom strolling, scrolling that sometimes happens when you're on Twitter or X for too long.

00:03:30.340 You just have to remember to turn it off.

00:03:31.620 I still think it's important, like on the weekends, on Sundays, I put my phone away and give my attention entirely to my kids, my family.

00:03:38.600 And so just to answer your question, like not having CBC, obviously that was great.

00:03:43.220 I mean, I didn't have to listen to propaganda.

00:03:44.840 I didn't have the rising blood pressure that happens when you have to, you know, subject yourself to the misinformation, to use their term, or just a stream of media narrative that they try to ram down your throat.

00:03:58.460 That was a nice break.

00:03:59.540 I encourage all of your watchers and all of your listeners to just tune out of the legacy media because the more you pay attention to them, really, the more frustrated you will be.

00:04:08.340 When you mentioned the Twitter X thing, I was just imagining you trying to reinstall Twitter and not being able to find it.

00:04:14.840 You're like looking at your phone, where is this tool?

00:04:16.420 What the hell is this X thing?

00:04:17.780 Where did this come from?

00:04:18.980 I know that you were like living in a cave or anything like that, but I will ask you on that because if we talk about the way media has changed, it used to be that news was an active thing that you had to go out of your way to consume.

00:04:31.060 You picked up the newspaper.

00:04:32.120 You read it.

00:04:32.860 You closed the newspaper.

00:04:33.900 That was done.

00:04:34.520 You turned on the TV at 6 o'clock or 11 o'clock, and it was done.

00:04:38.080 You are right in that social media has led to a barrage of news throughout the day, and I'm a news junkie, so for me, I've never viewed that as a negative, but it does change the relationship people have with news.

00:04:50.500 This is now something that is kind of endured or that you can be bombarded with.

00:04:55.300 It's not something that you just can have a sort of a set part of the day that you deal with it in.

00:05:00.560 Yeah, and I think it's a negative part of our culture.

00:05:03.460 I think that's part of the reason why none of us can really get along anymore, and we were all like at each other's throats, especially if you think about during COVID when we just, you know, people just didn't see eye to eye or didn't agree with the facts coming out.

00:05:14.720 It's like, you know, you used to, to your point, you get the newspaper, and that was the news of the day, and then you wouldn't get more news until maybe that evening or the next day.

00:05:22.720 And, you know, the introduction of cable news, they called it the 24-hour news cycle because there had to be new news, you know, every, every, every hour to keep the airways filled.

00:05:31.320 Well, now with social media, it's like, it's like every second there's something new, and, you know, it could really suck you into this thing that political news is all that matters in the world.

00:05:40.360 It's all that matters in your life, and you define yourself in those terms, and it makes it harder to relate to people and, you know, people in your family, people in your friend group, people in your community that might not share the exact same political views as you.

00:05:51.460 It makes it more divisive.

00:05:52.820 So I think we would be better served as a society, generally speaking, to, to take a step back from that.

00:05:58.940 Yes, you know, be aware, be, be informed, know what's happening in your community and your society.

00:06:04.780 Definitely hold the government to account.

00:06:06.900 That's what we do at True North.

00:06:08.660 Don't let politics, you know, dictate every moment of your life.

00:06:12.120 Like, enjoy the real things that matter, your family, your friends, your relationship.

00:06:16.340 You go outside into nature and appreciate the great outdoors.

00:06:19.400 We don't have to be hunched over our laptops or over our phones all the time.

00:06:23.940 I think really having that human connection is so much more important than the digital world.

00:06:29.180 And, you know, social media is great, and it's really helped us, especially us in the news business, and it helps so many people connect.

00:06:34.720 You know, you think of friends from high school, university, that you're able to just really easily keep in touch with because of social media apps.

00:06:41.400 But obviously there's also the negative side to that, which is that technology can be very addictive, it can be very isolating, it can make you feel very lonely and very detached from the real world and being human.

00:06:52.080 And so it's just important to be aware of that and to make sure that you're not allowing yourself to be, like, sucked into the addiction of technology.

00:06:59.760 To go to the news industry side for a moment, the conventional wisdom is that news is in decline, media is dying, and I think in a lot of ways there's reason to think that.

00:07:08.840 You see mass layoffs from some of these big players like Bell Media and Post Media, but it's not the full picture because independent media outlets are growing.

00:07:18.320 I don't know if I'm – maybe I'm revealing too much, but I don't really care.

00:07:21.000 Just yesterday, you and I were chatting with some of our colleagues, and you just said, let's put up a job posting for X.

00:07:26.260 I won't tell people what the job posting was yet.

00:07:28.920 And that's, I think, an example of where obviously we have to be scrappy and we have to deal with a much smaller budget than our counterparts in the legacy media do, but we are hiring, we're not firing, and they are not experiencing that.

00:07:41.660 So I don't think it's fair to say that media is in decline.

00:07:45.220 I think it's fair to say that the landscape is shifting, but I'll ask you why you think, and maybe it's content, maybe it's business, maybe it's the business model or something else entirely, but why is that happening?

00:07:56.300 Why is independent media able to grow when legacy media is not and has had to rely on bailouts just to even maintain?

00:08:04.520 Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely a good comparison, and it's fair.

00:08:07.140 I mean, if you think about it, like the very reason that they had to go hat in hand to the Trudeau government is because their business model is stale, and they haven't adapted to the new digital landscape of the new digital world.

00:08:17.500 The newspapers and all of these subscription-based platforms really required a captive audience and a monopoly in terms of advertising, and we just don't see that anymore.

00:08:27.920 It's way more efficient to advertise on Facebook or on Google.

00:08:31.500 You'll actually reach the very specific demographic in the very specific area that you're looking for, as opposed to putting an ad in a newspaper.

00:08:39.680 So I think that True North has been able to not go by that sort of, like, we don't rely on advertising at all for our business.

00:08:47.380 And I also think that there's something that has gone fundamentally corrupt within the legacy media, whether they realize it or not.

00:08:54.540 They are biased. They are beholden to the Trudeau government.

00:08:58.280 And I think perhaps their worst crime, Andrew, is that they're boring.

00:09:01.300 It's so much of the sameness. It's so much repetitiveness.

00:09:04.640 They have very limited way of looking at the world, and the way that they present the world is very static.

00:09:09.320 It's very inauthentic. Whereas, you know, when it comes to True North, you get podcasts.

00:09:13.920 You get something a little bit more real, a little bit more relaxed.

00:09:17.120 You have people talking about politics, but they can also talk about culture and community and family and other things that interest them.

00:09:23.540 And so I think that this platform is just more consumable.

00:09:27.660 It's more natural. It's more relatable to so much of the audience, which is why we do have that audience.

00:09:33.180 You know, it's not just because we're offering the other side of the story, which we do, telling stories that aren't being told.

00:09:37.900 We do. But I think that the new platform and these new independent media companies like True North just offer a more entertaining, more interesting platform.

00:09:46.820 And, you know, so much of the legacy media is just really stuck in this old dated model.

00:09:52.640 And unfortunately for them, they're not. Fortunately for True North, you know, we've found great success.

00:09:59.300 We found an audience. We're continuing to grow.

00:10:01.200 We've been pretty conservative in our growth just because we didn't want to go out and spend tons of money, you know, not to be able to have something sustainable.

00:10:09.080 But we are in a position now where we are growing. We're doing big things. We have exciting things on the horizon for 2024 and beyond.

00:10:15.800 I'm really excited about it. I actually think it's a great industry. It's a great time to be in the industry because it's changing.

00:10:20.720 And if you're able to, you know, adapt and continue to search for that audience, I think you can be rewarded as we are here at True North.

00:10:26.940 I felt bad because I always love hearing feedback from people. We were at True North Nation, which was an event you were at and I was at that True North hosted in Calgary.

00:10:35.080 And we had, I think, like 450 people out from our audience, which was fantastic.

00:10:40.460 And one guy came up and said, have you considered starting a newspaper? And I thought he was joking and he wasn't.

00:10:46.080 And I felt bad about that because I think I may have chuckled instinctively.

00:10:49.160 But no, I think that, you know, really the answer is no, is that, you know, the reason that a lot of these companies, as you say, are having such a difficult time adapting is because they are so reliant on things that are very costly, that have very high overhead.

00:11:02.160 I mean, I look at Sun News Network, which was a great example. You and I, I mean, you had more of a role there than I did.

00:11:06.780 I just appeared every now and then on some of the shows.

00:11:08.660 But this was, I think, spending 20 million dollars a year and had a fraction of the audience that True North has cultivated with a fraction of the budget that Sun News had.

00:11:20.360 And look, it only lasted a couple of years before that was just unsustainable.

00:11:24.920 Yeah, it's a very sad story. I worked at Sun News Network in Toronto.

00:11:28.440 And let me tell you, Andrew, it was such an impressive outfit.

00:11:31.380 Like you walked into the studios and it was incredibly sophisticated, modern, like the amount of equipment that they had.

00:11:38.700 The studios were beautiful, huge staff, big newsroom.

00:11:41.940 It was really fun to work there.

00:11:43.460 But I think you're right. They sort of put the cart before the horse, so to speak.

00:11:47.960 And they really built this this really modern, incredible, expensive apparatus.

00:11:53.660 And unfortunately, they just didn't get the right regulations.

00:11:56.360 Things didn't go their way.

00:11:57.560 They didn't get the mandatory carriage on Canadian news.

00:12:01.340 You have to keep in mind that the Canadian news business is, you know, very controlled, very government controlled.

00:12:06.620 And they didn't do they didn't do that part correctly.

00:12:09.660 As far as the audience, it's hard to tell.

00:12:11.580 It's really hard to tell how many people are watching TV in any channel.

00:12:14.900 I think that a lot of those numbers are really over exaggerated when it comes to how many people are watching CNN,

00:12:20.800 given that any time you walk through an airport, every single TV has CNN on there.

00:12:25.080 Same with CBC in Canada.

00:12:26.720 So I think that the numbers that they believe that they're getting are quite exaggerated.

00:12:30.220 But look, you know, I spent the beginning part of the interview talking about how social media can be addictive and it's good to get off of it.

00:12:36.860 But at the same time, that's how True North reaches its audience.

00:12:39.800 That's how we have been able to build this really incredible media company.

00:12:43.040 And it is because of these channels like YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram.

00:12:48.500 Unfortunately, the last two, we've basically been blocked from having access to things to the true government's regulations and laws.

00:12:55.800 Hopefully that will change and we'll get back onto those audience.

00:12:58.960 But it just shows you, again, how important it is to continue to adapt.

00:13:02.280 Like for us at True North, we can't rely on that Facebook audience.

00:13:05.420 The Facebook audience used to be our biggest audience.

00:13:07.140 It isn't anymore and, you know, we've had to look to other places, Rumble and other social media outlets because we can't rely on that one because you never know what the Trudeau government is going to do.

00:13:16.900 You never know if that social media company is going to just start banning your opinion because they don't like it, as we did see during COVID.

00:13:22.620 So, again, it's a fun, interesting business because you have to constantly adapt, constantly be changing, constantly making sure that you're remaining diversified and you're remaining able to reach the audience that you have cultivated.

00:13:35.660 Just for people, let's go back to the basics here because you shared at True North Nation the origin story of True North, which I sort of have heard a few times now just because I was there not at the beginning, but not long after it.

00:13:46.640 And I know you've shared it elsewhere, but there's this new wave of audience that we get every, well, I mean, I'd say several times a year, but certainly at points such as the election, the Freedom Convoy, COVID, we bring in new people that haven't been there since the start.

00:14:01.180 And I think it's like, you know, the laborers in the vineyard parable in the Bible.

00:14:03.900 We welcome you all regardless of when you started.

00:14:05.700 But how did True North shift from what was originally envisioned as a think tank and very narrowly focused on immigration into this independent media powerhouse?

00:14:17.220 Yeah, no, it's a great question and it's a great point that we need to explain the origin story because not everyone was there from the beginning.

00:14:23.340 Many people were and we appreciate those people who have supported us from the beginning.

00:14:27.040 But yeah, like my own background, Andrew, prior to getting into media and being a journalist, I had more of an academic background.

00:14:32.720 I worked at think tanks in Vancouver, in Washington, D.C.

00:14:36.000 And, you know, I wanted to do something sort of more academic, writing papers, writing policy papers, focused on immigration, telling the other side of the immigration story, which is just the need to make sure that people integrate and that they embrace Canada and talking about immigration security and some of the threats that happened there.

00:14:52.600 Anyway, I started doing that.

00:14:55.080 But then I also had a column in the Toronto Sun and been a longtime columnist and writer over there.

00:14:59.560 And what I found was that through my research would lead to me writing news reports.

00:15:04.500 And every time I would write a news report that would get into the Toronto Sun, my audience, the people who supported True North in those early days, really wanted more of that.

00:15:12.540 They were like, you know, these white papers are fine, but nobody reads them and they're not really having an influence because Justin Trude is a prime minister.

00:15:18.440 He's not reading them.

00:15:19.240 So, you know, why don't you do more of the research, more of the investigative stories, more breaking news stories about immigration?

00:15:24.980 And that was the part that just sort of had interest and no one else was really doing it.

00:15:29.680 And so we pivoted.

00:15:30.660 We said, OK, let's let's focus more on telling news stories, doing investigative journalism to do with immigration, to do with terrorism, to do with border security.

00:15:38.640 And at some point it was like, you know, this is just too, too, too narrow as well.

00:15:43.760 Why are we only talking about one issue when there's all this other stuff happening in Canada?

00:15:47.440 And Andrew, you know, as a journalist, as soon as you start telling stories and start researching in one area, you just start getting so many tips and so many leads and so many people pointing you in different directions.

00:15:57.840 Really, I couldn't do it by myself.

00:15:59.040 So I started bringing on other journalists.

00:16:00.620 And now, you know, we focus on anything and everything in Canadian politics and Canadian culture and, you know, beyond.

00:16:08.020 I think, Andrew, you've gained yourself a very big following by going to Davos and exposing the World Economic Forum.

00:16:14.320 So, you know, it's not just limited to Canada, although obviously we're all Canadian and that is our focus.

00:16:19.040 But, you know, I think just even that origin story of how we pivoted, how we went from just focusing on research to wanting to do journalism, it shows something that I think every business owner knows to be true, which is that you can't be too firm in your position.

00:16:36.040 You have to be amendable to changing, to pivoting, to focusing on something new, depending on what the audience wants and where you're finding success.

00:16:44.440 And so that's basically what we did.

00:16:45.660 How do you define the editorial position?

00:16:49.880 Because one of the challenges is that people in our space tend to get typecast by our critics.

00:16:55.000 And, you know, every now and then the Huffington Post or whatever will slip in like a far right.

00:16:58.960 And if you call them on it, they scurry away and change it because they know that they really can't defend it.

00:17:03.680 But for people that like what is true north in that sense?

00:17:07.560 Well, I think that that sort of old dynamic of left versus right doesn't really always apply.

00:17:12.820 I mean, if you look at even just COVID and the vaccines, like people who were in favor of it versus people who opposed it, it didn't really fall on left, right, conservative, liberal views.

00:17:22.560 So I think that there is a lot of sort of changing landscape when it comes to just political ideology in general.

00:17:28.520 But I think as far as what we do at True North, from the perspective of our news, we are independent.

00:17:35.520 I think that we just look to tell the other side of the story, look to tell stories that aren't being told.

00:17:39.920 There's no agenda.

00:17:41.380 There's no like persuasion.

00:17:43.320 It's just like, let's tell the stories of Canadians.

00:17:45.580 Let's tell them in a fair and accurate way.

00:17:48.060 Let's try to be unique and entertaining.

00:17:50.140 Yes, but let's tell the news.

00:17:51.500 And so I think our news division, we try to be just neutral and straight down the middle.

00:17:56.420 As far as our podcasts, I would say that we would probably tend to be more center right, conservative, critical, certainly of things like wokeism, you know, critical race theory, the Trudeau liberals, a lot of the sort of gender stuff that they push in.

00:18:12.800 We tend to be very opposed to radical Islam and terrorism.

00:18:17.540 And so those things, I think, certainly in Canada, would put us more on the center right.

00:18:23.020 But, you know, it's really interesting.

00:18:24.200 But because of our coverage, for instance, during COVID, when we were just really telling stories of people who got fired from their job because they didn't want to get a COVID vaccine or people who were skeptical for their own reasons, the audience that we're reaching really wasn't center right.

00:18:38.180 It was just Canadians. 0.99

00:18:39.380 And I think we brought a lot of people on board, I think a lot of people who would have never thought of themselves as conservatives, but, for instance, supported the Freedom Rally and supported the truckers.

00:18:48.400 All of a sudden, they were smeared as far right.

00:18:50.080 They started to realize, like, wow, you know, Candace Malcolm and Andrew Lawton are smeared as far right, but they're obviously not.

00:18:55.860 So maybe, you know, they're getting smeared as far right.

00:18:58.840 I have friends right now who are Jewish, who are pro-Israel, view themselves as liberal.

00:19:04.400 But all of a sudden they're asking, you know, why is it only the conservative and right-wing media that is talking about this issue of these sort of crazy pro-Hamas rallies in Canada?

00:19:14.020 And it kind of makes them question the entire media narrative, and they say, well, you know, why does it take right-wing media to expose this?

00:19:23.440 Maybe you're not right-wing after all.

00:19:24.820 Maybe I shouldn't have believed what the legacy media has said about you all these years.

00:19:28.680 And, you know, I think everyone has their own moment when they wake up to realize that the things that legacy media say aren't necessarily true.

00:19:36.000 And I think that so much of what the legacy media has said about our organization over the years really doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.

00:19:43.320 Yeah, and I would also add to that, and it's a distinction I've made elsewhere, that there's a difference between being right-wing media and media that is of interest to people on the right.

00:19:53.560 And by that, what I mean is that you can have an approach where you cover things that matter to a subset of the population without pandering to them and without being especially biased.

00:20:03.480 And one of the things that I've absolutely loved doing with True North is covering leadership races within the Conservative Party.

00:20:10.520 We've had two in the time that I've been at True North, one in 2020 and another in 2022.

00:20:15.960 And in both of these, True North really stood out for asking questions of leadership candidates that mattered, whereas whenever any of these went on CBC, for starters,

00:20:24.920 they're not speaking to the people that actually make the decisions in those races, which are Conservative Party members,

00:20:30.000 but they're speaking about issues that don't even matter to people.

00:20:32.920 They're asking questions about climate change and abortion and systemic racism, whereas people want to know how are you going to deal with Quebec,

00:20:40.180 and what's your view on supply management, and how are you going to keep caucus together, and are you going to have free votes?

00:20:45.200 And I think that's probably a real distinction of where we add value, and it's not that we're being uncritical.

00:20:50.540 I think oftentimes we have harsher words for some Conservative politicians than we do for some on the left.

00:20:55.800 It's that we are asking those questions in a way that matters to a portion of the population that really seems to be forgotten or denigrated by the legacy media.

00:21:04.360 Yeah, no, that's so true.

00:21:06.320 I think Vivek Ramaswamy, running for Republican leader down in the States, made a similar point the other night.

00:21:11.240 Like, why are we doing these Republican debates, you know, with the legacy media, with these journalists who hate us?

00:21:16.300 I think that in Canada, a large part of the population, a large portion of Canadians just get written off by the legacy media.

00:21:24.640 They don't understand them.

00:21:25.580 They don't like them.

00:21:26.220 They don't care about them.

00:21:27.520 But when you see the legacy media attacking Pierre Polyev, when you see the legacy media overtly attacking Conservatives,

00:21:34.540 even Conservative media like myself and you, Andrew, we're really just a stand-in, right?

00:21:39.140 We're a stand-in for everyday Canadians that the media doesn't understand and doesn't like.

00:21:43.800 And I think a lot of people finally see that.

00:21:46.300 They see through the idea that, you know, during a leadership race, why would a Conservative want to sit there and focus entirely on the Liberal agenda

00:21:54.820 and Liberal talking points and Liberal issues, when issues that matter to many Canadians and Conservative voters just happen to be very different.

00:22:01.860 Like, we don't want to sit here and talk about hypotheticals and talk about, you know, law changes that will never happen.

00:22:07.700 We want to talk about the cost of living and we want to talk about, you know, our communities and our culture.

00:22:11.380 And I think that giving those people the time of day, trying to understand them, the Trucker Convoy or Freedom Convoy, again, is a great example.

00:22:18.560 Rather than just looking at people and writing them off and saying that these are hateful people and we're not going to talk to them,

00:22:23.680 you know, go figure out what it's all about and go figure out who these people are.

00:22:26.780 And I think that's a lot of what we try to do here at True North.

00:22:29.480 When you talk about storytelling, I've always been very keenly aware of the fact that True North is speaking to an audience that often doesn't get covered.

00:22:38.220 And I mean, this is a big part of what CBC always says it does, is it wants to tell the stories of people in the rural and remote communities, people in the north, indigenous communities.

00:22:46.600 And if CBC stuck to that, I think it would be more defensible as a public broadcaster.

00:22:51.420 Instead, they want to, you know, host the Junos and, you know, have hockey, you know, games and play the Oscars and host the Olympics and all that stuff where there is a significant private sector competition.

00:23:01.780 What do you think are the underserved communities in this country where True North can really make an impact in telling those stories?

00:23:08.600 Well, just to add on to that point, I think the CBC loves to cover sort of very small communities when it comes to, like, I don't know, a First Nations community that believes in transgenderism that does some special ceremony.

00:23:22.580 Like, they'll find the most obscure, strange, you know, thing that applies to, like, three people, and they'll focus on that and tell an entire story on it.

00:23:30.920 And meanwhile, they'll completely ignore, like, vast numbers of working class First Nations people and Canadians who support industry, who want to see more things getting built, who want more development and more prosperity in the north.

00:23:43.700 So it is pretty ironic.

00:23:45.560 Look, I grew up in Western Canada.

00:23:47.260 I grew up, spent much of my time in high school in a very blue-collar community on Vancouver Island.

00:23:53.560 And the kinds of people that I grew up with and the things that mattered in those communities felt invisible at the time.

00:24:01.020 And I think when I look back at it now, they're still invisible.

00:24:03.660 I think that there's a lot of struggles that people in blue-collar, smaller communities deal with.

00:24:09.840 That's not visible.

00:24:10.740 That's not obvious to people who live in Montreal, Toronto, or Ottawa.

00:24:14.920 And so they just don't get told.

00:24:16.200 And I think that a lot of our audience for True North are people in Western Canada, people who feel ignored by the federal government and the legacy media.

00:24:24.180 And those are the kind of people we want to stand in for, really, in a lot of ways, Andrew.

00:24:29.040 It's kind of the underdog.

00:24:30.380 It's the people who get either ignored or get bullied by the elites in the legacy media.

00:24:35.820 Like, again, just to go back to COVID and the people who were choosing not to get vaccinated for their own reasons.

00:24:41.420 You were never hearing those kinds of stories in the legacy media.

00:24:43.820 They just simply weren't being told.

00:24:45.100 People who were being discriminated against for their choices, people who had very valid medical reasons for not choosing to get vaccinated, they were just demonized.

00:24:51.900 And they were written off.

00:24:52.600 And the media didn't care about them.

00:24:53.640 The media didn't ask many questions.

00:24:54.940 They just didn't want to see them.

00:24:56.480 And I think that True North provided quite a big service.

00:24:59.300 And we grew our audience significantly during that time by simply going out, finding those people, telling their stories, doing real reporting, talking about the things that were happening in those communities.

00:25:08.300 I don't know why the legacy media chose to just completely disregard those people and not cover their stories because, first of all, their stories were really interesting.

00:25:16.580 And by telling those stories, True North was able to, again, grow our audience, connect with a large number of people, create trust with a bunch of people who might not have otherwise heard of us or trusted us.

00:25:26.180 And I think that, again, it was their loss because they just chose not to do their job, which was to report things that were happening in the country.

00:25:34.480 And it gave us that opportunity.

00:25:36.520 And I think that that served us well.

00:25:38.040 It's a good reminder going forward that those are the kind of stories that we seek to tell.

00:25:41.460 That's the kind of thing that we want to tell.

00:25:43.420 And that's why we're here.

00:25:44.440 We're going to continue to tell those stories.

00:25:46.380 And to go back to Sun News for a moment, one of the things Sun News did that I always really respected was make a point of covering any provincial election, regardless of how big or small the province.

00:25:55.460 I mean, they had someone out in PEI.

00:25:57.240 They had a couple of people there when PEI, which is not a powerhouse population-wise in this country, was going to the polls.

00:26:04.160 And one of the great assets that we have is that we have a very decentralized team at True North.

00:26:09.160 And that doesn't mean we can cover the entire country.

00:26:11.400 We don't have a full-time presence in Atlantic Canada right now, but we have in the past.

00:26:15.760 And we've got people in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and so on.

00:26:19.140 And that, I think, is really helpful because one of the big problems of the media is that you've got certainly local media in these sections.

00:26:24.800 But the national media kind of views the country as just being this corridor from Toronto to Montreal and Ottawa, and that's really it.

00:26:33.240 And anything that happens outside of that just becomes more and more abstract.

00:26:37.740 No, you're really, you're right.

00:26:39.120 And I hope that we do get presence in Atlantic Canada again.

00:26:42.520 At one point, we had two or three reporters out there.

00:26:44.260 It sort of just depends on the cycle.

00:26:46.260 I was talking to a friend of mine out in Nova Scotia the other day, and she was talking about how there's basically one radio station.

00:26:51.500 And they play things in a loop.

00:26:53.640 And, you know, if you want to just find out what's happening locally, it's actually quite hard.

00:26:57.340 And it's interesting, Andrew, because, you know, the whole point or part of the point of having these media bailouts and having these subsidies and tax credits to media companies is so that they will provide local journalism.

00:27:09.220 And they'll provide storytelling and keeping people informed throughout the country.

00:27:15.320 And they don't do that.

00:27:16.180 They don't do that clearly, because when you talk to people in Atlantic Canada, you know, I said that we focus on Western Canada as partially my own bias because that's where I'm from.

00:27:23.120 And that's what I'm more familiar with.

00:27:24.400 But I would love to hire someone on Atlantic Canada.

00:27:26.660 And I, too, like that about Sudden News Network, especially for, you know, political junkies like us who actually really care about all these little mini small elections that are happening, municipal or provincial.

00:27:36.520 It matters.

00:27:37.400 And it's interesting.

00:27:38.240 And it helps tell a bigger story.

00:27:40.000 And so I love that, you know, you and your producer, Sean, are able to just hop on a plane.

00:27:43.940 I'm sure you have more air miles, Andrew, than just about any other journalist in the country.

00:27:47.760 You're constantly on the road, constantly traveling around the country.

00:27:50.480 And I love that.

00:27:51.360 And I hope you can do more of it.

00:27:52.700 But, yeah, I think it's very important to tell these stories.

00:27:55.120 And, again, unfortunately, the media is just, the legacy media is just not doing their job and keeping Canadians informed.

00:28:00.480 I think my wife hopes I do more as well.

00:28:02.380 It makes things easier for her when I'm out all the time.

00:28:04.400 But there's one question I'll ask you in closing here, Candice.

00:28:07.260 You alluded earlier in a very vague way to plans for 2024.

00:28:11.880 What's on your list for 2024?

00:28:13.620 What do you want to see True North doing next year?

00:28:15.860 Well, it's funny.

00:28:16.320 We just had a Christmas party.

00:28:17.700 And we, I mean, maybe, maybe it's not such a fun Christmas party when we sit there for half the day and do strategy talks.

00:28:23.940 But I think that's part of what we like doing with our journalists.

00:28:27.000 Yeah, but Rachel already outed us that we went to the arcade after. 1.00

00:28:29.680 So it's okay.

00:28:30.520 People already know.

00:28:31.400 She blabbed to the audience about our secret fun plans.

00:28:34.460 Well, it's good that the audience at least thinks that we have a little bit of fun and that our Christmas parties aren't just like sitting in a boardroom at a hotel talking about our business plans for 2024.

00:28:43.460 But, yeah, no, I think we're growing.

00:28:46.140 We're going to continue providing the news that people like.

00:28:49.740 Some sort of exciting things that we're talking about, which is building more in-person studios somewhere in and around Toronto.

00:28:56.540 We're currently looking at real estate and looking to build a proper setup.

00:29:00.660 You know, one of the things that has helped True North grow and be successful is that we basically all outfitted ourselves with these great little home studios during COVID.

00:29:09.220 And it is great to be able to, you know, record a show for me.

00:29:12.500 I'm basically a part-time stay-at-home mom.

00:29:15.000 And being able to be close to my kids is really great.

00:29:17.920 But at the same time, when we're doing professional interviews, when we're doing shows, we want to, as we grow, we want to basically be able to have an in-person studio.

00:29:25.660 So, we're working towards that.

00:29:27.880 Like I said, we've been conservative with our finances in the past, but we really are investing in growth.

00:29:33.520 So, we will be growing.

00:29:34.600 We'll be having new shows, new setups, new studios, all that kind of stuff in 2024.

00:29:39.620 And I'm really looking forward to the journey and to continuing to grow this wonderful organization.

00:29:44.440 Well, you didn't mention cancelling a show there, so I can breathe easy for next year anyway.

00:29:49.280 Candice Malcolm, founder of True North, the editor-in-chief and my longtime friend.

00:29:54.180 It's great to see you, as always, Candice.

00:29:55.700 And people can check you out at the Candice Malcolm Show at TNC.news now.

00:30:00.760 Thank you so much, Candice.

00:30:02.440 Great. Thanks for joining me, Andrew.

00:30:03.920 And Merry Christmas to you and your family and to the whole audience.

00:30:07.200 I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas.

00:30:08.840 Yes, ditto to you as well.

00:30:10.220 That does it for us for today.

00:30:11.420 I am off next week, but you will have lots to keep your company over at TNC.news.

00:30:16.440 And as always, if you want to support independent media, you can do that at donate.tnc.news.

00:30:21.740 That's The Andrew Lawton Show signing off.

00:30:23.320 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:30:26.140 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:30:28.460 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - November 30, 2023

How independent media is growing while legacy media is dying

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