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Allied Arts & Media

The New Future of Journalism (It’s Not What You Think)

An image of three women against futuristic backdrop with a globe made up of people photos
From left to right: Anya-Milana Sulaver, Anita Li, Stacey Lee Kong

Stacy Lee Kong had a revelation. The editor and publisher of Friday Things had just come through the Canadian Film Centre’s Fifth Wave Initiative, a feminist startup accelerator program dedicated to the growth and development of women-owned digital media enterprises. Lee Kong is a veteran of the legacy lifestyle media space, earning her chops with magazines like Chatelaine, Canadian Living and Flare.

Lee Kong is well-versed in how to do the editorial side of things. But in starting her own business, she wasn’t sure about how to do marketing and sales.

People – white people – in more established media outlets told her not to waste her time with an accelerator. But Lee Kong found it useful, both for what she learned and for the access to people who could help her.

After she wrapped Fifth Wave, Lee Kong said she was reflecting on the people who told her it was useless. Then she realized those people didn’t look like her, didn’t have her experience, come from a more privileged background.

And this was when she had the revelation.

“I was like, oh, you just know lawyers. You just know salespeople,” says Lee Kong. “You know who’s investing in community media and you can get a meeting with them. That’s why you think it’s useless.”

Anita Li is nodding her head vigorously as Lee Kong is speaking. Li started her new media outlet, The Green Line, after “feeling invalidated” by the legacy media outlets she worked for in Toronto.

Li grew up in Scarborough, the eastern part of Toronto, where visible minorities make up 73.4% of the population and 56.6% are foreign born.  Her parents moved there from Hong Kong.

Growing up in a highly diverse part of Toronto, “I was keenly aware of  the fact that the dominant media narratives were white,” Li notes, adding, “Growing up with that disconnect was a weird thing.”

Li left Toronto for New York in order to pursue journalism that focused more on equity and justice issues, as Canadian media rarely covered those topics, especially through a race lens. Li worked for large American digital media outlets including Mashable, then Complex Media. Li helped oversee coverage of the 2016 U.S. election (the election that Trump won) as Fusion’s justice editor. 

What Li was learning while working with progressive, innovative outlets in the U.S., she realizes now, was a different way to do media than she had learned in college and her early work life in Canada. She learned about data and analytics, but also how to serve a community of readers. She brought this knowledge back to Canada, editing for a Vancouver indie media start up, The Discourse, before coming to the realization that journalism should do more than describe and analyze. For Li, journalism is about solving problems.

Anya-Milana Sulaver, publisher of long form, investigative journalism based Peeps Magazine,  wanted a way to look deeper at problems – at the ground level, with people embedded in communities. She, too, felt like she wasn’t allowed to do real, anthropological investigations in the Canadian media ecosystem.

Sulaver is the daughter of a Serbian immigrant father and a mother who looked down upon her father’s ‘peasant’ roots. She found her mother’s view more dominant when she was first working in media in the 1990s when the war in the former Yugoslavia broke out. Sulaver wanted to tell stories from the perspective of the people on the ground, people she knew from childhood summers. She was told Canadians would not be interested.

So she went back to school. A lot. And came out with multiple degrees and an understanding of how media works and how academics work. In her start-up magazine, Peeps, she is fusing the two.

Lee Kong, Li and Sulaver all met at the Fifth Wave Initiative. They are all doing journalism that some in Canadian legacy media – even those who are focused on helping budding female entrepreneurs – don’t consider journalism. All three agree that they don’t care. They would rather move journalism into new forms than fit into the old ones – the old ones that either don’t include them or innovate fast enough. 

The Power of Pop Culture

“I think there are a lot of dismissive attitudes towards pop culture and its importance,” says Lee Kong, encapsulating the challenges of reporting serious journalism through the lens of culture.

An image of a young woman with long brown-black wearing a maroon scoop neck sweater.
Stacy Lee Kong, founder of Friday Things. Photo Provided.

That’s what Lee Kong does. Every Friday, her newsletter delivers incisive takes on what is happening in check-out line magazines, and how they are more important to our lives than we think.

“If millions of people are paying attention to [pop culture] then it really behooves those of us who are trying to make sense of the world to pay attention to the same things,” Lee Kong says.

“People coming to news outlets are not just looking at what happened, but why they should care.”

Lee Kong has a gift for writing about the real issues beneath the celebrity veneer. She recently wrote about how western media outlets are positioning the invasion of Ukraine like a TV drama, about how people writing in prestigious newspapers and magazines are complaining their voices are stifled, and about how entertainment media is ignoring the abusive nature of Kanye West’s treatment of his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.

The Kardashian story, says Lee Kong, is not a celebrity story. It’s a domestic violence story.

“I’m only talking about them ‘cause you know their names,” Lee Kong says in a Zoom interview. “They’re the clever trick. I really want us to think about the issues that these stories bring up.”

Lee Kong started Friday Things when she was passed over for an editor-in-chief job for a magazine for which she was working. She had worked up the ranks and was acting as the de-facto editor in chief after a few people had left.

“Everyone seemed to think I would get that job, and I didn’t get the job. I had a team of people I had been leading for months at that point.”

This sent her on a path of self-reflection about what women – and specifically women who are, like her, ‘An ethnically ambiguous person of color’ with roots in the Caribbean  – can and should expect from a journalism industry that centres a point of view that doesn’t include hers.

“If you wanted to drill down and say, ‘I want to know how many of our readers are racialized,’ then you would be told it would be racist to gather that information, so there would always be plausible deniability.”

Moving Toward Solutions

Li also wants to know who her readers are, which is why she’s including them in her journalism. She will not only be talking to them, but asking them to analyze problems and crowd-source solutions.

The Green Line will cover one long form feature or investigative story per week – starting in April – about a systemic problem facing Toronto, focusing on Gen Zs, Millennials and other under-represented communities

Their ‘Action Journey’ will start with an explainer breaking down the systemic problem they’re reporting on. The next week, they’ll post a long-form, interactive feature that reports local solutions to the problem. In week three, they’ll host a live town-hall event to crowd-source more solutions. And in week four, they’ll unpack those solutions with another written piece. You can follow all this on a website that takes you on a visual journey through the stories.


Photo of young asian woman, Anita Li, wearing a white shirt
Anita Li, founder of The Green Line. Photo by Michael Cooper

On social, The Green Line will engage people with humor, which is why the main people Li has on her team are a comedian, an audience engagement manager, and a social media manager.

Li is clear that she and her team are not activists. They’re journalists, bringing people together and reporting on possible solutions.

“I believe in vetting all sources, reporting widely and fact checking,” she says. She is not, though, going to give space to something – like climate change denial – which is not true. She wants to solve problems, not drive clicks, using ‘values driven editorial framework’.


Re-defining journalism

Sulaver is not going to hire a comedian to sell Peeps. She does, however, teach anthropologists how to write for a wider audience than their academic peers.

The anthropologists Peeps works with are in communities writing about specific topics or people. They are doing this through their universities, but Sulaver knew their stories often were lost in academic journals. She also knew that the people telling these intricate stories would not want to work with publishers who did not understand the research.

An image of a platinum blonde woman with blue glasses wearing a red turtle neck sweater. Book case behind her.
Anya-Milana-Sulaver, publisher of PEEPS Magazine. Photo Provided.

The stories in Peeps can take up six months to tell. There’s the anthropologists’ first take, then there is the editing process that focuses their writing without losing the complexity. Sulaver said it can take up to five rewrites before a story is ready.

There’s also photography. Sulaver hires some of the best photographers in the world – and pays them well – to highlight the communities the writers are covering. Sometimes, she has found, the photographers who come from these communities don’t agree with the premise of the piece, or find differences when they interview people they photograph. With Peeps, Sulaver makes room for these disagreements, because they are part of the story, part of the search for truth.

The storytelling in Peeps resonates. First, the site is gorgeous. Sulaver is as intent on curating the pictures as she is making sure the writing is authentic. She also gets her writers to tell specific stories that have larger reverberations.

All three women want to make a difference in their worlds, and a difference in journalism. They are pushing against ways of thinking that say the stories they tell aren’t important, and their ways of telling them aren’t ‘correct’. Lee Kong, Li and Sulaver want to tell stories about people who don’t see themselves in the headlines, and who often aren’t deemed ‘newsworthy’.

They may just be changing the definition of journalism in the process.


Publishers Note: Peeps, The Green Line and Friday Things are part of the Fifth Wave  Initiative, a year-round program offered by CFC Media Lab and its partners to support the growth and development of women entrepreneurs in the digital media sector in southern Ontario. All enterprise founders in the Fifth Wave community are selected for both their potential and commitment toward weaving intersectional feminist ideals of equity and fairness into sustainable and scalable business growth strategies. Fifth Wave Initiative is committed to minimum of 50% participation per cohort by members of underrepresented groups. The Fifth Wave is a LiisBeth ally sponsor at the Lighthouse levelApplications for Cohort 5 are open. Apply here


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Allied Arts & Media

A Bridge to the Past: Flashes of Activism from rabble.ca

“Everything On (The) Line: 20 Years of Social Movement Stories from rabble.ca." Photo via rabble.ca's website.

I don’t remember 9/11. 

Maybe that’s because I was a Canadian toddler, rather than American, or was just too young — but opening to the first story in Everything On (The) Line: 20 Years of Social Movement Stories from rabble.ca I am transported back by the moving words of Monia Mazigh and Barâa Arar, mother and daughter of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian who was arrested on September 26, 2002. 

This transportive ability — to travel back in time and to live something you have a different memory of — is the primary accomplishment of rabble.ca’s  compilation of stories from the last twenty years. 

rabble.ca is an independent, nonprofit  award winning left wing media outlet with 1M unique readers annually worldwide, based in Vancouver (original territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations). They aim to extend and amplify the work of social movements and front-line activists in Canada.  

Everything On (The) Line is a collection of stories, but also the fossilized voices of journalists and activists during high-intensity moments in Canadian politics. Editors S. Reuss and Christina Turner have unearthed articles from rabble’s archives which capture the concerns and opinions of the activists, feminists, and fighters before us —concerns that still exist today. 

The articles speak from Indigenous rights to climate change; personal accounts of protests and violence; outrage and critique for the government. The collection focuses on the personal lives of Canadian citizens impacted by these threats, while also panning out to inspect the governments of the early 2000’s, tying traumas from the violent injustices occurring around the world together: uniting pain but also hope across two decades. 

The aim of the collection is not only to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Rabble, but to allow the past and present to converse; articles from 2001 in tandem with essays from 2020. 

It is an opportunity for readers to “reflect on the social movements that challenged capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy over the past two decades.” (5)

Readers hear the personal stories from Monia Mazigh and Barâa Arar, to personal accounts of when Black Lives Matter Toronto turned the Pride Parade into a protest. Words from protestors of the G8 Summit burn with anger still, 19 years later. 

In her piece “What Do We Want and Where Are We Headed?” Pamela Palmater expresses how “ultimately, we want to be free to govern ourselves as we choose; free to enjoy our identities, cultures, languages, and traditions; free to live the good life as we see fit.” (129) This desire for freedom and respect echoes throughout the twenty-four pieces in the book. 

Anger and fear and distrust bubble up within these essays. 

Amber Dean writes about attending Robert Pickton’s trial in 2007 for the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, and Georgina Papin — asking how colonization can be over when the violence persists?

Michael Stewart picks apart the Harper government’s inability to “cope with the tender, patient, ironclad solidarity of Indigenous people in Canada.” 

Murray Dobbin asked in 2009 how the government would face their denial and complacency in the face of crisis. 

All are systemic issues still present today; the final section with pieces from 2015-2020 carry ghostly echoes of the first section from 2001-2005. This disturbing parallel calls for transformative justice, addressed by Walters and Zellars in their 2020 essay on abolishing the police and collective care. They call this turbulent time an “[opportunity] for reflection and growth [which] must be central to our abolitionist imaginings” and to “have the courage to dream, try, fail, try again, and fail better.” (173) 

The collection also contains new essays from esteemed writers such as Nora Loreto. In her piece “Real Change Meets Radical Tactics” Loreto traces the resurgence of feminist action in recent years, raising the point that “for what remains of the mainstream feminist movement, the dominant frame is still firmly white. Whiteness obscures the fact that women do not experience systemic violence in the same way. It creates a tent so large that feminism becomes a matter of self-identity […] feminism has become slippery and toothless.” (145) This comment spoke to me as a reader, as a feminist, and as a member of LiisBeth, because whiteness is a barrier in the feminist organizations I see and participate in. 

LiisBeth’s masthead is primarily (some queer) white women; “Everything On (The) Line” was compiled by two white women; LiisBeth partners with rabble.ca’s, putting together a monthly roundup. A white, queer woman is writing this review, the last in a funnel of white voices. 

That being said, 35 per cent of LiisBeth’s contributors are women of colour and over 50 per cent of the articles written in the last year featured enterprises and projects founded or operated by women of colour, queer women and trans folk.  

When rabble.ca was founded, a UNECE study found 40 per cent of journalists in Canada were women, and 97 per cent of journalists across all media were white, according to a study done by Laval University in 2000. This statistic from Laval University, as well as the point that there was (and still is) no current study to compare this data to, was mentioned in a rabble.ca piece in 2016 by Joanna Chu titled “The face of Canadian Journalism is still white — and it’s time to push back.” 

The collection spurs questions and invites reflection not just on the state of our world, but also journalism — those who wrote before us and how future writers will curate, cultivate and uplift all voices. 

It’s an opportunity to see how far we have come, but also look at where we still need to go. 

Everything On (The) Line is not perfect, because history is not perfect. What we glean from these reverberations of rallying voices is that the next twenty years should be equally as action-packed, as fueled by the desire for change. We should read about and reach for change, as the voices of rabble.ca have. 

The fifth section of the collection is titled “Activism and Indie Media: Pasts and Futures”, where publisher Kim Elliot and Mathew Adams call rabble.ca a bridge for the social movement, and reflect on how the launch of rabble.ca in 2001 gave them the focus of “[amplifying] the voices of resistance struggles and movement-focused news.” 

Hopefully, Everything On (The) Line can be the bridge to the past that lays the foundation for the next twenty years of rabble.ca.

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Activism & Action Our Voices

Lunch with a Feminist Icon

A feminist icon has lunch at The Pilot in Toronto

Let me gift you with a feminist trivia game for your next feminist holiday gathering. And I’ll wrap it up with a big hint: the questions all have the same answer.

Question #1: Who was the woman who saved the life of abortion rights advocate, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, by fearlessly stepping in front of an attacker wielding garden shears at Morgentaler during the opening of Toronto’s first abortion clinic on Harbord Street?

Question #2: Who led the fight to get abortion legalized in Canada in the 1980s, while serving as president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NACS), the feminist lobby group that represented more than 700 women’s rights groups across Canada and, from 1971 to 2007, successfully pressured the government to take action on daycare, birth control, women’s right to choose, maternity leave, family law, poverty, racism, women’s equality in Canada’s Charter of Rights, and violence against women—to name just a few issues?

Question #3: Who is Canada’s Gloria Steinem? Okay, that’s not an entirely fair question as we like to think Canada has a few. But, on top of authoring seven books, hosting a prime-time TV show, and writing countless articles about the women’s movement and social justice, this woman also co-founded rabble.ca, Canada’s largest independent, alternative news outlet and discussion site, and served as its publisher?

Question #4: Who understood and acted on intersectional feminism—social justice for all women—long before it was a thing?

Still stumped? You can imagine my frustration when I excitedly gabbed to everyone I knew that I was meeting Judy Rebick for lunch! Too often, the response was, Who is Judy Rebick?

Judy Rebick’s latest book is a memoir titled Heroes in My Head

 Who is Judy Rebick?

Well, I can tell you that Judy Rebick is a woman who not only shows up when she’s needed—she gets there early. She was already waiting for us at The Pilot tavern, a hangout for writers, musicians, and artists since Toronto’s Yorkville hippie days in the 1970s. Gordon Lightfoot performed with Bob Dylan here. It’s also steps away from the Toronto Reference Library, a place where writers spend a lot of time.

When I arrived, Rebick looked up. Though we had never met, we recognized each other immediately. Her stance, head of thick but now graying curls, and iconic glasses gave her away. Rebick greeted me with a big “in solidarity” hug. LiisBeth’s associate editor Lana Pesch, rushed from her day job, as eager to meet this feminist icon as I was, joined us soon after.

We quickly ordered coffee and lunch so that we could get down to talking without further interruptions. Rebick, now 73, was as keen to know about us as we were her. We shared histories and some great stories, then I shifted the conversation to a topic we came to learn more about: growing a sustainable media outlet in a time of turmoil for media enterprises in general.

Judy Rebick on Idle No More

I asked her what we, as feminist changemakers and publishers, could learn from her experience both as a long-time feminist journalist and as a co-founder/publisher/editor of rabble.ca, an alternative online publication (launched 2001) and now one of the country’s most successful, attracting 800 members, two million page views, and 350,000 unique visitors per month according to Google Analytics.

Specifically, for LiisBeth and our readers, I wanted to know the path to rabble.ca’s success. How did it ever get off the ground and survive this long, without a major foundation footing bills, angel investors or sponsors, or even a paywall?

Rebick told us that she and her co-founders were convinced that Canadians were frustrated by the mainstream press extolling neoliberal narratives. They wanted and deserved an alternative point of view on current issues and events. So Rebick and friends created a plan and hit the road to find funding. In one year, they raised $200,000 in startup funding including $120,000 from the Atkinson Foundation along with funds from some 18 unions—enough to code and launch rabble.ca.

Seventeen years later, Vancouver-based rabble.ca now generates approximately $350,408 in revenues, of which $121,000 (34.8 percent) come from reader donations. Income from sustaining partners (unions) represented another 50 percent while 14 percent comes from grants and various sponsorships. While the site promotes its advertising utility, less than 1 percent of its revenue comes from ads.

Rebick explained that unions backed rabble.ca as the publication offered a way for the left to connect and unions to connect with their constituents about ideas, critiques of policy, and economic analysis that the mainstream media largely ignored.

The idea of an online newspaper and participative forum for readers was totally rad at the time. That was early-stage internet and way before Facebook or Google.

Since its launch, some 90-plus independent news and magazine channels have appeared, and none have readership figures as high as rabble.ca yet. In Canada. But as Rebick filled us in on rabble.ca’s journey—the type of stories they chased and how—we were reminded how critically important alternative media is to any functioning democracy. Such media organizations hold political and business leaders accountable, bring new business models to light and offer an outlet for ideas of alternative world–making.

We were also reminded that financially sustaining an alternative indie media enterprise is a little like figuring out how to keep a fish alive and healthy out of water. After all, how do you challenge the status quo if you’re trying to raise money from people who benefit from systemic inequality?

Rebick certainly got us thinking, because at LiisBeth, we have similar values and face many of the same challenges as rabble.ca. We believe passionately that feminist entrepreneurs can change the world. We have faith in the idea that grassroots storytelling and discussion opportunities matter. And we dig deep to figure out what it takes to create, grow, and leverage a sustainable, social justice–forward digital media enterprise in today’s world.

Rebick believes that technology-enabled movements, aided by aligned alternative media outlets, are transforming power. Social movements—not governments, lobby groups, or corporate social responsibility initiatives—are correcting the course, exploding our ability to imagine new worlds, advance democracy and human rights, and force action on climate change. Rebick explained how different recent tech-enabled protests such as Arab Spring, Idle No More, and Occupy were to the anti-globalization rally in Quebec in the late 1990s. And she should know. She was there. On the ground. Involved in it all.

And suddenly, it was 2 p.m. Rebick was in demand again, at another meeting. She signed my copy of Ten Thousand Roses, the book she wrote on the making of a feminist revolution, and graciously rushed out.

Lana and I lingered, talking about how our conversation with Rebick was like getting drawn into an incredible living book on Canadian feminist action and social progress. The entire meeting was so engrossing that we completely forgot to document the occasion. No group selfie or even a picture of Judy. And we are a social media organization, with an online magazine and newsletter!

How will anyone ever recognize this incredible feminist icon? Chagrined, we took a picture of the chair she sat in.


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