Thank You! Tyee Adds 900 New Members to Monthly Supporter Program

There are many exciting and satisfying things that come with working at The Tyee. Our tight-knit team works hard to put out original, deeply reported stories that you won’t read anywhere else. To see these stories get shared widely and have impact is rewarding.

Another more “meta” and equally exciting aspect of working at The Tyee has to do with charting a new path forward for independent media in Canada and growing our independent newsroom. The Tyee has been asking readers to financially support the publication for over 10 years now. When we started, crowdfunding for journalism was still an experiment, and considered by many an odd one at that.

A decade later, our Tyee Builder program has become the central pillar of our organization, the thing that makes our whole publication possible. On May 17 we kicked off our spring membership drive thinking that 500 new monthly supporters was an ambitious but achievable feat. We’re happy to report that by our campaign deadline last night, a total of 900 new monthly supporters had signed up, and hundreds more chipped in one-time contributions. To see the full list of new monthly and one-time donors, go here and scroll down to the bottom.

We hear from our supporters all the time that they appreciate that we don’t have a paywall, that we don’t require payment for people to access our articles. But keeping our site paywall-free does come with some risk: are we potentially leaving much-needed revenue on the table?

We’re happy to see that there is a growing number of readers who value an open-access independent news site, and they are willing to keep it that way by supporting it with their dollars. It’s no exaggeration to say we could not do this without them.

We’ll continue to work hard and put these new resources to their highest and best use. From everyone here at The Tyee, our deepest thanks.