Support Responsible Journalism. Become a Tyee Member

There’s a lot of junk journalism out there, plenty of clickbait and media that parrots the powerful.

And then there’s The Tyee, with a completely different model and mission.

We are responsible to you, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

We exist to carry out reporting of the highest standards. To be a non-profit newsroom supported by readers like you, members we call Builders. And to be transparent in how we spend your contributions.

We carefully track every dollar and, by maintaining a lean administration, we put maximum resources into investigating and seeking solutions in the public interest.

Ask yourself: How many other media outlets meet such criteria? Are other places you visit on the web non-profit? Locally rooted? High impact? Reflecting your values and inherently committed to serving readers like you?

If this sounds to you like a model for sustaining real, top-notch journalism at a time when it’s so badly needed, we invite you to become a Tyee Builder today.

We’re kicking off our spring campaign to bring on 500 new recurring members to continue to do what we do. Help us get there — join now.

To be blunt, we greatly depend on this annual spring fundraising drive to meet our budget and set goals for the coming year. If we don’t hit our mark, it means we trim our expectations. But help us get there, and you’ll be investing in more than The Tyee. You’ll be proving there can be a bright future for good journalism and the democracy it insures.

The Tyee is one of Canada’s oldest, most established independent online news sites, serving British Columbia and beyond for nearly 20 years. Think of us as a two-decade experiment swimming against the current of a corporation-dominated journalism industry in decline.

We were early innovators in crowdfunding for journalism — we started experimenting with directly asking readers for money in the mid-2000s. It helped solve a big problem we were facing: the kind of in-depth journalism we do is very expensive compared to other kinds of media stories, because our stories take time to report and write. But it’s tough to make the numbers work to support this kind of journalism, especially on a regional scale.

That said, we believe that B.C. deserves and needs in-depth, responsible, investigative journalism, so instead of throwing in the towel, we asked our audience to help us do the work.

To our great delight, thousands of people have signed up to fund our work in an ongoing way. And to keep our team resourced and even grow over time, we must come to our readership periodically to ask people to join as members. Which is what we’re doing today.

As one who visits our pages, you can find the result in the many original stories we publish every day.

Take, for example, the Tyee journalism that has earned 10 nominations for national journalism awards so far this year, putting the work of our relatively small newsroom in league with the largest legacy players in the country.

Consider the on-the-ground reporting we invest in to bring you stories from Fairy Creek and Wet’suwet’en territory.

And our thoughtful ongoing reported column about the housing crisis by two top-notch reporters.

We aim to bring our readers stories that touch a broad array of topics that explore life in this region, in all its complexities. And bring some beauty and wonder onto our pages here and there.

Here’s something else distinct about The Tyee. Transparency and accountability. To you.

You can know what our journalism achieves, and how we pay for it, by reading our annual impact report, which includes a clear breakdown of our business model, revenues and spending. No hedge fund owners. No bonuses for glass office execs. No ads by polluters or others who don’t match our values. No wasted dollars on fluff and filler.

So how do we operate and what guides our decision-making here at The Tyee?

On the editorial side, here are the questions we run through as we consider a story:

• Is this in the public interest?
• Does it surface the voices of the vulnerable? Hold power accountable? Point the way towards solutions?
• Can we be proud of our ethical approach to gathering the information we seek?

And on the business side of the operation, we ask of everything we do:

• Does it bring in revenue to support excellent journalism and the people behind it?
• Does it help us lock in long-term sustainability for the publication?
• Does it help us live up to the promises we’ve committed to our readers and members?

We have the privilege of keeping these questions front of mind because we have the backing of our community to do this work.

If you’d like to support journalism that puts commitment to readers first, please consider joining Tyee Builders today and help us meet our spring membership target.