Juno News - Paul Wells ditches the legacy media to go independent

00:00:00.000 when did you decide to take the plunge and go independent and what was the sort of main

00:00:04.160 motivating factor there so i left mclean's five weeks ago and um it's pointless to litigate why

00:00:14.200 the the um the new owners of mclean's are taking it in a different direction i thought they were

00:00:19.720 doing it clumsily and i figured life is too short to hang out with people who aren't fun to work

00:00:24.300 with so um um uh but when i quit i had no idea what i was going to do next i'm now at the age where

00:00:32.940 friends of mine who are teachers are starting to retire so i thought maybe i'll just stop working

00:00:38.120 i looked around for some corporate gig outside of journalism and and a there were not a lot of offers

00:00:47.260 b none of them sounded fun um and then in journalism i mean i could work as a freelancer

00:00:53.740 i've i've written a half dozen pieces in a month for a bunch of organizations um

00:01:00.320 but i figured at some point editors would get tired of me calling i the same thing would happen that

00:01:06.500 has happened other freelancers i could uh you know petitions one of the big news organizations

00:01:13.480 to hire me full-time uh but for 20 years people have been saying paul why don't you just

00:01:19.760 go out on your own uh you like that you know 20 years ago people were saying you could

00:01:24.860 just write a blog and then you know uh hold out a tip jar and people will give you money if they want

00:01:32.460 and frankly i found that terrifying but the the substack platform uh makes it super easy for people to

00:01:42.840 uh pay if they want it makes it really easy for journalists to organize and to decide you know

00:01:51.640 what they want to charge for what they want to distribute for free uh it takes care it's sort of

00:01:55.940 like shopify for uh for journalism it takes care of all of the back office uh plumbing that i'm really

00:02:03.620 not good at and it leaves the journalists free to write and so i thought i would give it a shot

00:02:08.260 and first day has been very encouraging

00:02:10.640 you

00:02:11.260 you

Juno News - April 21, 2022