Juno News - April 21, 2022


Paul Wells ditches the legacy media to go independent

Topics
substack platform
What Trudeau's censorship legislation means for Canadian content creators Trudeau wants to tax your pickup truck

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

170.19

Word count

378

Sentence count

—


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When I quit my job at a prestigious journalism agency, I had no idea what I was going to do next. So I decided to go independent. And that's how I ended up at a company called Mlean s.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
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