As a freelance journalist and writer Quammie often writes sharp and critical pieces about the intersections of race and popular culture. Two days after the shake-ups, she published a piece with Vice titled, “Are Diverse Hosts like Shad and Larry Wilmore Set Up to Fail?” “Monday was a bad day for diversity in media,” opened Quammie’s piece, which questioned whether diverse voices brought into major media outlets were supported or left to fend for themselves. Quammie wrote that the industry “has to do more than prop a non-white male on set to show an invested approach to diversification.”

Five years into her career as a freelance writer, Quammie says she’s still hyper-aware of the reputation she’s building, and finds herself constantly having internal negotiations within her head: to write or not to write on particular topics. “Am I being too much?” she often asks herself. “Am I closing myself off from certain opportunities? I’ve had that battle with myself… You don’t want to shut yourself out of opportunities, but you have an opinion and you want to share it.” These questions are only part of the internal negotiation that Quammie admits to having when it comes to her writing—both on her own blog, ’83 to Infinity, and with other media outlets. “I’ve said, ‘Okay, my last three posts: were they all about Black stuff? Should I mix it up?’” She adds that she doesn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just a feeling, Quammie says: “Should I speak on this? If I don’t speak on that, then what does that mean? Does it mean I’m a poor representation of my race?” In the end, Quammie, who has written for a wide range of publications including For Harriet, Revolt TV, Chatelaine, and the Globe and Mail, says that authenticity wins out. She goes with what she feels strongly about, and hopes that because she can back up why she said it and how she said it, she won’t lose out on opportunities as a result.

Many journalists and writers of colour, including me, have these types of internal conversations with themselves at least once in their career. From time to time, I look at my portfolio, and wonder: Will I be pegged as someone who can only write about diversity issues? And is that necessarily a bad thing? It’s important for legacy media outlets to understand how pigeon-holing writers and journalists into writing about race and diversity issues can lead to this internal conflict—and can also devalue the breadth of knowledge and experience an individual brings to the table. After all, a white journalist is rarely confined to write only about “white issues.” In fact, when Black Lives Matter Toronto held a sit-in at the Pride parade 2016 to protest several aspects of the organization it deemed racist and oppressive, the pundits sounding off about it across major media outlets were overwhelmingly white.

As more legacy media outlets in Canada feel growing pressure to further diversify their newsrooms and the stories that they tell—take Canadaland’s damning “Just How White is the CBC?” that found 90 percent of the outlet’s staffers were white—diversity must become part of newsrooms’ inherent philosophy. As Toronto-based diversity strategist Tana Turner tells it, the onus of ensuring honest and fair reporting and commentary that doesn’t further perpetuate and stigmatize various ethno-racial communities cannot rest squarely on one diversity reporter. She says feeling like the work starts and ends with hiring this one reporter “lets the other reporters off the hook” because they won’t feel like they need to address diversity in other areas, such as education or crime.

There must be buy-in from the entire newsroom. Shani O. Hilton, head of U.S. news at BuzzFeed News, hit the nail on the head in her 2014 Medium piece, “Building a Diverse Newsroom is Work.” She wrote: “Any newsroom in which the Black staff is expected to speak for Blackness while the white staffers only have to speak for themselves is a newsroom that’s failing.”

***

More than a decade ago, when Camille Dundas got her start in media, she worked for a mainstream broadcast media outlet. While sitting next to one of the station’s producers on a plane flying to Toronto for a training session, she glanced over at a list of all the names of people attending. Next to her name was an abbreviation; she didn’t know what it meant. She was surprised to discover it stood for “diversity hire.” “This was my first job and I actually didn’t know about diversity hiring,” she says. “That it existed. I was very young.” Comments she had overheard in the newsroom— like “that’s why she’s here, anyway” or “she wasn’t really qualified to be here, anyway”—began to make sense. She started to doubt herself. Luckily she received words of encouragement from a mentor that made her shake off her self-doubt. It may be the reason you got in the door, he told her, but it isn’t why you’re here. He assured her that she was valuable, and that she had something of worth to bring to the outlet.

Dundas continues to work in mainstream broadcast media as a news writer and producer, as well as editor-in-chief and cofounder of online publication ByBlacks.com. Despite how that experience made her feel, she says she still thinks the notion of diversity hires in journalism is necessary. But she does think news organizations should be transparent about their intent, especially so that new hires don’t view themselves negatively. “Don’t approach your life or your career as if someone’s doing you a favour,” she adds. “Because they’re not.”

Whether it’s overtly stated or not, this is something many people of colour entering journalism grapple with: wondering whether they’re hired to fill a diversity quota or based on their skillset and abilities. Arti Patel, lifestyle editor at Huffington Post, laughs when asked if the thought ever crossed her mind when she entered the workforce five years ago. “I thought about that as soon as I graduated. Am I being hired because of my colour? Or my resume? Or maybe both?”

Ann Rauhala, who has taught journalism at Toronto’s Ryerson University for the past 16 years, says she makes it a point to acknowledge the deep-rooted bias that racialized students may be up against in pursuing media. She reminds them: “You have a right to be there. Your story, your background, your interests are as legitimate as people in the mainstream.”

Like Hilton and Dundas, Patel says having people of different backgrounds who can bring varied perspectives and voices to a newsroom is important. Her own workplace is noticeably diverse and she says that the types of stories the outlet puts out are a reflection of that. Take for example, a multi-part series, which Patel helped spearhead, on the unique experiences of second-generation Canadians—the children of immigrants. It tackles subjects ranging from interracial dating to never hearing your parents say they’re proud of you. “Stuff like that is brought up through hiring a diverse staff,” she says. “I think when you do hire people of colour or people of different faiths and cultures you get different kind of content, which is great because it’s reflective of what the Canadian audience is about.”

***

Andray Domise got his big journalism break two years ago. He credits much of it to a handful of editors who acknowledged a gap in the diversity of voices and perspectives amongst their contributing columnists—and then set out to do something about it. Domise is a community activist and very vocal on social media about issues of social justice, education, and diversity, among other things. And so, he says, editors from media outlets such as Maclean’s, TVO, and Toronto Life sought him out when they needed commentators on issues such as police brutality and race relations. While Domise is grateful, and says he wishes more emerging and established writers of colour would get similar opportunities, he urges media outlets to see racialized people as more than one-dimensional.

While he notes that it makes sense for a publication looking for comment on a particular story related to race or diversity to seek out a writer with relatable lived experience, race shouldn’t be the only topic people of colour are viewed as experts on. He points out how few Black people he’s aware of at major Canadian media outlets who are writing frequently about things like sports, finance or politics. It’s the idea that, he adds, “if it’s racial it must affect us, but if it’s not racial, then we can rely on the commentary of an overwhelmingly white media who explains the experience of everyone who happens to be listening or reading.” And that is, of course, a big problem.

Quammie sees this play out in terms of both what writers of colour are asked to write about and when they are called upon for quotes as experts. “If we’re only in the media and only called upon to speak when it’s these issues to do with race or being a Black person,” she says, “you’re not seeing my humanity when I have other interests and I have other expertise.” This is why for Patel it’s important to note that diversifying goes beyond just covering race and diversity issues. In practice, that means crafting a lifestyle section that reflects a variety of ethno-racial communities when it comes to both authors of and sources. It means being intentional when selecting stock images. It also means understanding that people of colour are not a monolith—no one person can be expected to be an expert in the experiences and stories of all people of colour.

***

While the internal struggles that writers like Quammie experience are complex, there are steps newsrooms can take to better support racialized people working within them. For starters, Turner says that making the connection between the business of the organization appealing to a broader readership can help naysayers get on board. As of 2011, Statistics Canada reported nearly 20 percent of the population identified themselves as “visible minorities”—a huge segment to risk losing by not ensuring they see themselves reflected in the media. Turner says once people start to see the monetary value attached to diversifying it may help to alleviate the types of micro-aggressions Dundas faced in her first gig. “That’s when racialized people are hired and [not] seen as tokens or treated as the ‘diversity hire,’” she says.

Beyond this, Shenaz Kermalli, who has worked as a journalist for more than 15 years and is currently a professor in the Humber College journalism degree program, stresses the need for diversity to happen across the newsroom hierarchy. Even in the mid to late 2000s, when working overseas at Al Jazeera in the Middle East, Kermalli was surprised by the fact that the majority of the senior level management at the time was white. She says more measures— especially a more concerted effort to hire diverse folks at senior-management levels—are needed to help the racialized candidates already in the newsroom move up the career ladder. Offering mentorship and support to these individuals, as well as recognizing and naming implicit biases are some ways media outlets can start this work. “Once you get past that,” says Kermalli, “you can start having more intelligent discussion, which revolves around how to reflect diversity within diversity.”

Quammie says her experiences pitching stories related to race and ethnicity to white (often women) editors has been pretty positive, but adds that top-down change is essential. It’s important to recognize that even if white editors welcome her ideas it’s often through their particular lens. She says that there’s still an expectation that “this is what they think a Black female writer’s going to write about.” She adds that it’s important to ensure diversification happens in multiple areas. As an organization, she says, “It has to be throughout to impact the richness of whatever it is you’re trying to offer.”

More ethno-racial diversity within all newsroom ranks can result in many benefits, including removing any hints of tokenizing and an increased level of sensitivity in the packaging and production of the news. We need editors to accept more pitches about underrepresented or misrepresented communities and issues. We need more genuine relationships and trust built between media organizations and Canada’s diverse ethno-racial communities. And we need more journalists on the ground level, like me, to no longer feel like there is a glass ceiling placed on where they can go in this field.

In January 2016, just weeks before the Chronicle Herald would begin its still-unresolved strike, management at the paper offered Nathan Clarke a job. Clarke covers sports, and the Herald, Nova Scotia’s newspaper of record, wanted him to be its sports reporter, stepping in to fill the shoes of a striking worker—what’s called being a strikebreaker or, depending on whom you ask, a “scab.”

Clarke wrestled with the decision. (His name has been changed to protect his identity.) Steady, full-time work in journalism was—and still is—hard to come by. He had another freelance gig that kept him at the local hockey rink enough that he didn’t think it would make him look suspicious to other journalists if he took the job. But it was one of the Herald’s striking workers who recommended Clarke for the freelance job when he was an intern at the paper in 2012.

“The people who are on strike have actively helped me get work,” he says. “Here I am with the option to take a job that will give me money that, quite frankly, I really need. But at the same time I would be screwing over people that I work alongside and who have also helped me get to the point where I’m at.”

Clarke knew the risks. Kelly Toughill, now the former director of the journalism school at the University of King’s College in Halifax where Clarke studied, warned students and alumni against doing the jobs of the Herald’s striking workers. Toughill has spoken publicly about how the school doesn’t support students breaking the picket line. One-onone, when asked directly for advice on whether to take a job as a replacement worker, she’s told young alumni that the implications of working a “scab” job could follow them around for the rest of their careers, thwarting future job opportunities. That wasn’t a risk worth taking for Clarke, and eventually, he declined the offer. “I just can’t put a dollar value on that sort of thing,” he says.

But now more than ever, the dollar value bottom line dominates the newspaper industry. Papers across the country are hurting. Fewer resources, outdated business models, a public unwillingness to pay for news, and shrinking newsrooms plague print media. Unions such as the Halifax Typographical Union (HTU), which represents the striking workers of the Chronicle Herald, protect the people who propel newspapers forward and safeguard the editorial content from the market forces that newspapers’ management can’t seem to beat.

At the same time, millennials like Clarke are graduating from journalism school with thousands of dollars of debt and throwing themselves headlong into a contracting and competitive job market, where unpaid internships and years of unstable work are standard. Getting a full-time job out of school, let alone a job with a pension, benefits, and job security, is unlikely for most. Journalists are entering the workforce at a time when the five-day work week and eight-hour work day are taken for granted.

When the Herald’s unionized staff did strike weeks after Clarke’s job offer, management hired temporary replacement reporters in place of striking workers as cheap labour. Many of these reporters were young journalists and recent graduates, like Clarke, with little newsroom experience. The HTU has been ruthless in calling out these replacement journalists on social media, engaging in shaming tactics to ensure their names remain known after their stints at the Herald. Whether these shaming tactics are effective and conducive to dialogue is up for debate. Certainly, unions are in a tough position of balancing priorities: taking a stand against strikebreakers while also doing more to reach out to millennial freelancers—some of Canadian journalism’s most precarious workers.

***

The Chronicle Herald’s management locked its employees out of their offices and banished their bylines from its pages on January 23, 2016. Sixty-one members of the HTU—unionized reporters, editors, and photographers—voted almost unanimously to strike after contract negotiations fell through. As this story went to press, the strike at the Herald had been ongoing for 250 days. As the strike persists, the largest independently owned newspaper in Canada continues to operate with a skeleton newsroom of five full-time replacement reporters between the ages of 25–30. Meanwhile, its unionized workers have spent more than eight months walking the picket line every day through nearly four seasons.

The Herald strike is symptomatic of a broader state of crisis in the Canadian media industry. Recent years have brought a slew of bad news for newspapers. The same month the Herald went on strike, two other Canadian newspapers, the Nanaimo Daily News and the Guelph Mercury, folded. In August 2016, the Toronto Star announced 52 layoffs. Bell Media cut 380 jobs last year. CBC cut 400 jobs in numerous rounds of layoffs over the past two years. And this year, Postmedia announced 90 layoffs. Not even digital media emerged unscathed, with BuzzFeed shuttering its Canadian political bureau in Ottawa this summer. Media organizations continue to struggle to do more with less. “The whole business model of the penny press—supporting mass market journalism with advertising— is collapsing,” Toughill says.

In Halifax, this collapse has played out in ugly ways. The Herald dispute has been called a union-busting drive. David Wilson, the chief negotiator for the Communication Workers of America Canada (CWA) who represented the HTU in negotiations, says management proposed more than 1,000 changes in the collective agreement, including significant salary cuts and increased working hours, reduced benefits, and the removal of a pay equity clause (which it has since agreed to put back into the agreement). The HTU and management have, however, agreed to a five percent acrossthe-board wage cut. Wilson says the Herald’s management is asking for concessions that have never been asked for by any newspaper chain. “It’s a very scripted, one-sided negotiation where the local was expected to make all the moves, and the employer would do absolutely nothing,” he says. “That does not happen—this is not typical at all.”

The unusual circumstances surrounding negotiations didn’t stop the Herald’s striking workers from rallying as a team, says HTU vice-president Frank Campbell. For the most part, he says, the Herald’s striking workers have stuck together. Many began writing for Local XPress, an independent online newspaper the striking workers founded in January. But eight months can erode the morale of even the most dedicated picketers. Over the phone, Campbell’s voice sounds worn—it appears exhaustion has set in. And in April, photojournalist Eric Wynne suffered a stroke on the picket line. “When you’re in this thing for eight months, different people are at different places in how they deal with things emotionally,” Campbell says. “Personally, I try to stay as positive as I can. Would I rather be working and earning a steady paycheque for what I love to do? Sure.”

***

On April 9, 2016, the Chronicle Herald published an article about refugee children violently abusing other students at a Halifax elementary school. The news story had no byline attached to it, because it was written by a replacement reporter—a practice that had been put into place at the beginning of the strike. The story quoted anonymous parents who alleged that refugee students had been “pushing, slapping, and verbally abusing” their fellow classmates. The Herald was blasted for the story by local and national media, including the Globe and Mail, and the story was picked up by Ezra Levant’s right-wing outlet, Rebel Media, and anti-Muslim blogs. In the days that followed, the news story was edited and amended a number of times before it was deleted entirely from the Herald’s website. An editor’s note that appeared in the paper admitted that the story “needed more work.” The story is just one example of the many dangers of relying on the paper’s skeleton staff. Campbell says the story would never have gone to print looking the way it did if professional, experienced journalists and editors had been handling it.

Lezlie Lowe is a journalism professor at King’s and was a freelance columnist with the Herald when the story was published. She’s not a member of the HTU, and when the workers went on strike, she continued to file her weekly column rather than breach her contract. She faced backlash from the HTU and the community in the form of shaming tweets and what she calls anonymous online commentary. But when the refugee story broke, she quit. “It felt like continuing with the paper in the face of that was implicitly condoning the bad journalism, and condoning the idea that it’s okay to do that, and it’s not,” she says.

It’s not just experienced writers who have condemned the paper since the story broke. David Swick, who previously taught journalism ethics at King’s and dispensed advice to journalism graduates on scabbing, says he knows of three King’s graduates from the class of 2015 who were approached by the Herald to scab and turned the opportunity down. During lunchtime conversations, Swick says he was struck by how many students spoke up against strikebreaking practices. “I don’t know if it was an appreciation of unions, or an instinct for justice,” he says. “But you’ve got young people who were heading out into a tight workforce, and who were saying they would not take a job with the newspaper of record in town because it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

But in a tough job climate, what’s stopping other young journalists from taking a much-needed job as a strikebreaker? For Toughill, it’s a matter of pragmatism: some news organizations won’t hire a journalist if they’ve “scabbed”—the media scene is small, and careers will effectively be ruined. She adds, however, that while she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, she does understand why some young journalists feel compelled to do it—it’s tough financial times for journalists and they have to pay the rent. For Nora Loreto, a freelancer and Quebec director of the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), it’s much more clear-cut: “From the perspective of someone who has been on strike for a hundred-plus days, their kids might not have clothes bought for them because someone is scabbing.”

For this story I reached out to four young replacement reporters for the Chronicle Herald. Of the four, two agreed to speak with me and then later reneged, saying they didn’t want to put their jobs at risk, or that it was their own story to tell. Two declined outright. To say the Herald’s replacement staffers are cagey is an understatement.

The HTU uses Twitter and its Facebook page to shame replacement journalists, calling them out by name, and posting images of the stories they’ve written with their bylines and tagging them in it. In March, for instance, the HTU tweeted, “Congrats to a certain young scab who’s just signed [a] contract as multimedia CH journo! Enjoy my your job! #CHstrike.” Attached was a photo of a vulture and a dead animal carcass. While not part of the union, Lowe says she received her fair share of online hate: people would take photos of her from the internet and make memes. “I got baited a lot,” she says.

To people unfamiliar with labour politics, this culture of shaming might seem heavy-handed and counterintuitive to sparking dialogue about the negative effects of strikebreaking labour. While it might not be an effective way to stop people from scabbing, says Toughill, such shaming tactics have a long history, even if some might feel they’re “somewhat repugnant.” “In many cases, that’s what we do as journalists,” she says. “We hold people up to the light and say, ‘Look, this is what this person is doing. What do you think of what this person is doing?’” Toughill admits it’s a easier in the age of social media. “I would be very distressed if it were following someone’s children or their spouse,” she says, “but I think it’s a little bit naive if you’re going to work for a striking organization, to think you’re not going to be called out for that decision.”

***

It was clear to Clarke that he wasn’t being approached by the Herald back in January for any reason other than a profit-serving one. “Looking at the quality of some of the reporting since the strike began, I don’t feel like it was ‘we’re looking for the best young journalists in Nova Scotia to help us put this paper out during the strike,’” he says. “It seemed like a ‘get whatever we can’ kind of grab.” Meanwhile, Mark Lever, the Herald’s CEO, has called freelance labour a cost-effective strategy to producing content.

The CFU is in a unique position to reach out to young journalists like Clarke who are trying to carve out a living independently. Founded 10 years ago under Unifor, the union is charting new territory, but has to be careful of stepping on the toes of other locals of full-time newsroom staff. The CFU is one of a few freelancer unions in Canada, and represents a broad cross-section of people, but each of their 250 members is a precarious communications worker. “The existence of my union is an experiment,” says Loreto. “We’re not a real union, because freelancers don’t have a common employer.” While she admits unions are human, fallible organizations, she says that when we prioritize the discussion surrounding the one or two people strikebreaking and erase the fact that there are 30 people on the picket line defending the basic tenets of journalism, it’s a move that is reducing all of these complicated social issues to the individual level. “It’s making the problem about whether or not we’re being fair to this 22-year-old guy from the University of King’s College,” she says.

Recognizing this fundamental difference of understanding of “the collective” is core to being able to talk to young workers, particularly those under 40, about the importance of unions and organizing. “If you’re a young journalist,” Loreto says, “you have to be critical of the mainstream, profit-serving narrative.” Rebecca Rose, a young freelancer who has been the CFU’s Atlantic organizer throughout the strike, says she organized trips to the picket line for King’s students, spoken on panels and wrote literature, and offered outreach for students and young freelance journalists. She says the visits by current or future freelancers to the picket line meant a lot to the striking workers. “Herald management went really hard with trying to recruit recent grads,” she says, “and to see us resisting that was really important for the strikers.”

Rose says the Herald’s striking workers are people she wants to learn from. Walking the picket line with them over the past year, she says she’s gotten valuable advice from their decades of experience. “But that’s the thing: as a freelancer, do you want it to be just you, isolated, working from home and without a community of other freelancers? Or do you want to have that camaraderie?” she asks. “I want to have that camaraderie. It’s just fighting back against this individualistic mindset we’ve been sold.”

An aging man in a green turtleneck loudly plunks at the keys on his dusty keyboard. He finishes writing and the corners of his mouth curl upward involuntarily as he reads it. For he is a “media critic” in Canada and he has just written an assortment of banal criticisms that now give way to the smug satisfaction accompanying his self-delusion. Somewhere is his missive he probably used the words lickspittle, bafflegab, chowder-head, popinjay, charlatan or even poppycock. He has called out easy targets on their “baloney”, made reference to all the hot air floating around Ottawa and bemoaned the state of journalism in a condescending fashion. Don’t get him started on blogging he’ll sneer to anyone who will listen.

That’s the archetype anyways, as I’m sure not all of them wear turtlenecks. But an examination of the purported critics of media in Canada finds the few who exist are more focused on over-officious examinations of journalistic practices than honesty about the media outlets that populate this country. The ones I’ve come across seem to believe that haughtiness is an essential tool of criticism just as a delusional self-made “real life superhero” believes a series of well-timed kicks in hockey pads and a handmade cape can prevent crime. What they both lack makes only one of them truly absurd; both have zero self awareness but only one of them needs it to do their job well. (It’s the media critic)

Enter Jesse Brown’s CANADALAND, a podcast offering honest discussion of Canadian media. For those of us who want to see our journalistic institutions taken to task without the stodginess of a grandfather talking about how things used to be — Jesse Brown is really our only hope. His strength is not that he is young while others are old, not that he is smart while others are dumb. His strength is that he has a level of self awareness that is necessary to cover the painfully insular world that is Canadian Journalism.

“Nothing in Broadcasting is directed at me,” Brown tells me. “That is what I want the show to be. You would never know how much conflict there is in the work force in general in Canada if you just read Canadian newspapers or watched the news.”

And that’s what the first video released by Brown, entitled “The Globe and Mail hates young people”, attempts to address. The response, he says, has been overwhelming and almost completely positive—except for those in powerful positions who don’t take too kindly young wHippersnappers (extremely non-silent H) criticizing them. Brown addressed the criticism of his…criticism on his website admitting that while some of it was fair, a lot of it was thin skinned whining and he reserves the right to “fuck up” as long as he “owns that shit”.

“Why is there no Canadian Daily Show, why is there no Canadian Gawker, why is there no Canadian On the Media, why is there no Canadian David Carr,” Brown asks Michael Enright in his first podcast before they quibble over media critics in Canada. What he’s really saying is: Where is our brutal honesty?

The answer to that question, as they go on to discuss, is that Canada is a small country and journalism is a small world, so biting the hand that feeds them is a very real fear for Canadians working in media. The tenuous nature of the business and the fact that media jobs are disappearing is also helping to turn our fifth estate into humourless sycophants.

But Brown will stick with it. He doesn’t want to define too narrowly what CANADALAND will be, learning from past projects that organically letting the show become what it will become is a better way to go about things. What he does know is that he will continue to push for honesty and candour on his podcast, filling the void of true media criticism in a country that desperately needs it.

You can find the podcast every Monday on itunes and videos on CANADALAND’s youtube channel every three weeks or so. You can also go to canadalandshow.com

Here, the only assessment can be a failing grade.We remain bedevilled by the antics of those federal entities that invoke national security at the drop of a hat to restrict the dissemination of vital information to journalists and, in turn, the public. Perhaps this attitude is best exemplified by a recent exchange between a federal government lawyer and the Military Police Complaints Commission, in which the lawyer not only challenged the commission’s right to obtain certain government documents on detainee transfers but went so far as to indicate that he was not at liberty to discuss when those documents might be available. Add to this the countless delays and roadblocks put in the way of access to information and we are left wondering how the prime minister could praise the media’s attempt to hold government accountable while abandoning his own promises of access reforms so loudly trumpeted on the campaign trail.

At least, this is the optimistic picture presented in a new book entitled Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media, and its accompanying blog. Authors and activists, Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark examine the recent surge of progressive media from 2004 to the present and envision a strong, continuous rise in popularity based on their observations.

This article published by alternet.org discusses the content of the book and makes reference to current media trends that have enabled independent liberal media to thrive. The article states:

In the old days, it was considered a big success when a progressive magazine had 200,000 monthly subscribers. But today, there are a dozen or more blogs, magazines and online news sites that have enjoyed more than a million unique readers in a month.

With well over a billion worldwide internet users, progressive online media outlets in the form of blogs, news sites and magazines are reaching and capturing larger audiences than ever before. This is great news for Canadian media organizations like rabble.ca, The Walrus, Adbusters and, of course, This Magazine. (It should be noted that even mid-size American media Clark and van Slyke talk about easily dwarf their Canadian cousins—200,000 subscribers in Canada would rank among the largest publications in the country—which we certainly are not.)

Yet, a larger audience isn’t the only advantage for progressive web-based media. Instead of relying on advertisers as a main source of funding during a time when budgets are tight, online independent media outlets also benefit from the support of government grants and reader donations. This, in turn, has allowed them to produce and remain consistent with the uncompromisingly lefty content that their readers crave.

The alternet article points out that:

… the new progressive media use a range of strategies and tactics that are far more hard-hitting and activist-oriented than the smaller print magazine universe that dominated progressive media for a long time.

While Clark and Van Slyke paint a flattering portrait of this new face of progressive media, they recognize that there are still a few flaws that remain to be fixed.  One, being its disproportionate demographic since the majority of audience members are primarily white, middle-aged and well-educated. Other weaknesses include its lack of funding from wealthy foundations and individual billionaires, as well as its tendency not to invest in major media and communication in order to challenge the power of corporate big-wigs like CTVglobemedia and Canwest.

Nevertheless, the solution the authors propose is simple, and one that progressive media is already beginning to undertake. The establishment of larger and more interconnected models of  social networking and an increased collaboration among independent media outlets should help alleviate the previously mentioned problems, increase its overall influence and allow it to continue to, quite literally, progress.