Building the Tyee

The Tyee has spent more than two decades proving that independent digital journalism can grow without putting its reporting behind a paywall. Publisher Jeanette Ageson joined the Vancouver-based publication in 2014, helping turn its reader-supported Tyee Builder program into the financial backbone of the organization. In this interview, Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau talks with her about The Tyee’s evolution from a small digital startup into a regional newsroom, the importance of recurring reader revenue, the risks of relying on outside platforms and why a broad base of supporters can help protect editorial independence.

Before we get into The Tyee, could you tell us a little about your path into journalism and publishing? What brought you to The Tyee in 2014?

My path into journalism is interesting because I’d never worked as a journalist before I started at The Tyee. My background was in nonprofit fundraising and events. I did that for about four years, and I have a degree in communications.

My path to The Tyee was that, at the time, they had an in-house team that was dabbling in reader revenue and membership, and they created the Tyee Builder program. They’d seen some early success with that and had the opportunity to create a role called director of community development.

Basically, they were making a bet that the membership program had a lot more room to grow, so they wanted to bring someone on with digital fundraising chops. They created my role, and I did that for about a year and a half. I also did all of our events for about a year and a half.

A year and a half into my tenure, the founding publisher who hired me transitioned out, and I took over the publisher role. I started out from the fundraising and event side and then became responsible for the whole business side of the organization. I learned how to lead an organization’s finances and operations.

Throughout my whole tenure at The Tyee, I’ve always worked with a really strong editorial side. We’ve worked closely as business partners, but I haven’t actually worked on the editorial side.

So how do you make sure that everyone has the resources to do their work? What does that job look like day to day?

We’ve grown a lot since I started. There were five staff when I started in 2014, and now we have about 25. That’s quite a bit of growth, but we’re still a fairly tight-knit organization.

I’m in regular contact with the editorial side, namely the editor-in-chief. We’re always talking about needs the editorial side has. We’re checking finances regularly. We project into the future a lot.

We try to keep tabs on what core items the organization needs to do what it does, and then the extras that would make things progress or sing, or new experiments that we want to try.

We have a prioritized wish list. If I have an opportunity to fundraise for extra funds, I go out into the community and do that, or we roll it into one of our fundraising campaigns to sustainably support new things.

The writing and journalism are core to what we do, but we know photojournalism is important as well. For a lot of new projects that we pitch, we are rolling a photography line item into that.

The Tyee launched in 2003, which makes it something of a veteran among digital-native independent publications. Could you talk about the original idea behind it, even though you weren’t there at the time, and how it has changed over the past two decades?

It was started by Dave Beers, who had previously been working in a senior leadership position at the Vancouver Sun, the paper of record for the city and province. But he’d had a long career before that in the United States and in the Bay Area specifically.

He’d worked for the San Francisco Examiner and Mother Jones, had freelanced for all the big magazines in the States, and then moved up to Vancouver and had some jobs here.

He left the Vancouver Sun in 2001, and he had that unique perspective to see that the Bay Area and Vancouver had a lot in common in terms of the feel of the place, the cosmopolitan nature and the West Coast positioning.

He noted that the publishing and journalism scene in the Bay Area was a lot more varied and diverse than Vancouver had at the time. He saw an unmet need for something like The Tyee, so he started The Tyee with some support to meet that need.

I don’t know if they had dreams of it directly competing with or replacing any of these large journalism institutions in Vancouver, but it was very much meant as an addition to a more vibrant media ecosystem.

Lots of things have changed over time. It was a private company at the start, and then changed hands from one owner to another in 2018. We transitioned to nonprofit ownership in 2022. Those are some major shifts.

We went from a very, very small, two-person operation, with lots of experimentation in the first 10 to 12 years, to a five-person operation.

In the last eight years, we’ve grown a lot relative to how we started. A lot of the bigger news organizations have gotten a lot smaller, so we’ve come a lot closer in terms of our reporters on the ground, publishing output and original journalism.

It’s much closer in terms of output and influence to some of the larger institutions than the founders ever thought possible.

For somebody outside British Columbia who has never encountered The Tyee, how would you describe the publication today? What makes it different from conventional local or regional news organizations?

We’re still completely online, so we don’t have a print publication. We’ve done some physical journalism experiments, but it’s never been a standard part of the publishing scene.

All of our stories take place somewhere, and a lot of them are centered in B.C., particularly southwest B.C., where most of the people in the province live. We have some in Alberta.

But we aren’t a hyperlocal publication. We’re not just writing about Vancouver or communities in the north, even though we have a reporter based there. We’re much more regional in nature. Our outlook is a B.C. perspective. There isn’t really a comparable regional organization like that.

Our business model is very different. We are nonprofit. We got qualified donee status, which means we’re like a charity and can give charitable tax receipts.

We’re paywall-free, so you don’t have to purchase anything to read The Tyee. But we are supported by thousands of voluntary subscribers or members, who we call Tyee Builders. We have about 12,000 of them, and that’s how we make most of our money.

A small sliver of our funding comes from things like advertising — about 6 percent of our revenue, off the top of my head — which is fundamentally different from a lot of other news organizations.

We’re focused on the reader experience, and we have more of a back-and-forth relationship with our readers than I think many other news organizations have.

You’re based in British Columbia, but your coverage goes beyond that. Do you define yourself as a local or community-based journalism organization?

I would say regional.

The center of the universe for publishing in Canada is more in Ontario, in Toronto and Ottawa, so it’s not common for a non-local news organization to be based in the West.

But that’s what we are. The center of our universe is based more in the West, but we don’t only report on what is happening here. We do a lot of reporting on B.C. and increasingly in Alberta, but we also don’t limit ourselves to just that.

If there’s something of interest happening nationally or internationally, we will publish about that as well.

Our lens is more that we are publishing what is of interest to people in this region, which isn’t limited to what’s happening here.

Being based in British Columbia, do you feel you have an advantage over other news organizations covering things happening in your backyard?

I definitely think The Tyee is a point of pride for a lot of our supporters, and a lot of our supporters are based in the region.

There are many organizations doing fantastic work about things that happen in B.C. Increasingly, we have international news organizations like The New York Times and The Guardian doing reporting here. Their work is fantastic.

But I think the people who support us are proud of the fact that we are based here, and they want to help support something where the reporters live here. We’re dedicated to this place. In that way, I think that’s our niche.

As newspapers shrink or disappear, what kinds of stories or communities in British Columbia are most at risk of simply falling out of the news?

The hyperlocal newspapers, I think, have been struggling a lot. Newspapers used to be supported by their local businesses, which would spend their ad dollars there.

There are some double whammies. A lot of local businesses are not so local anymore. Chains don’t necessarily spend money in their local newspapers, and even local businesses don’t necessarily put money into local papers anymore.

Most of the advertising dollars in the country go to Google and Facebook, so they go right out of the country and don’t support journalism.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Local Journalism Initiative, which is a government-supported program meant to bridge this gap and fill local news deserts. That has supported hundreds of reporting jobs across the country.

Who knows how long that will go on? Technically, that program is sunsetting next year. It would be devastating if it didn’t continue because that is what’s keeping a lot of reporters in these local papers.

You have a strong relationship with your readers. What does that relationship look like at The Tyee, and how does it sustain your business model beyond simply having subscribers?

We don’t look at our members as customers. We try to relate to them as people who want the same things we do, which is a belief in journalism and its usefulness for positive change and as an essential part of our democracy.

When we are inviting members into The Tyee, we’re inviting them in that fashion. We share with them and are as transparent as we can be about how we operate and how we’re different.

We are quite transparent with our financials and how we’re funded and how we spend our money.

Then we invite people to join us in supporting the organization and helping it grow, which is why we called it Tyee Builders. That really is the case.

That is the area where we’re seeing the most sustained growth of all our revenue lines. The only way we are growing right now is when we bring on new Tyee Builder members.

It’s not like, “Buy this.” It’s: If this is meaningful to you and you see The Tyee’s work as being valuable, help it sustain and grow by joining Tyee Builders.

The Tyee Builders get a slightly closer relationship to The Tyee. We put out a Builders-only newsletter quarterly, so they get behind-the-scenes interviews with people on the team.

Increasingly, we’ve been doing live events and some online events, and we always give early access and either very discounted or free tickets to our Builder members. Any opportunity to get together in person and form that personal connection is really important.

We regularly survey our readers.

We have a welcome series on our email list when someone joins, and an email goes out that says, “What’s on your mind that you would love to see our newsroom tackle?”

They can reply directly to that email. A member of our operations team will respond and direct them to reporting we’ve already done, go into our archives and show them what we’ve done, but also send that request straight to our editorial team. Our editorial team does look at that.

We are very interested in what we can do to meet the information needs or curiosities of our readers. Because so much of our funding comes directly from our readers, it aligns us to focus on meeting the distinct needs of our readers.

Over the past 20 years there have been different revenue models for the company. What have you learned about what actually works, and do you have new initiatives to remain sustainable in the future?

The team has always been pretty experimental with making revenue in a way that is complementary to the mission and keeps our credibility intact.

Lots of things have been tried over the years. We’ve always had an advertising side of the organization, but that has been really kneecapped over the years for many reasons, as we’ve talked about.

When I was originally brought on, my role was to do the membership program but also master classes, which was an idea we looked to The Guardian for.

They ran these master classes for a while where you’d have an expert in a journalism or journalism-adjacent field putting on weekend classes, and people would pay $200 to attend.

We did that for a while, but I ran the numbers on it, and we broke even at best. We didn’t really bring in any money from that.

We’ve done lots of different kinds of events. Events are tough. Anyone who does this kind of work knows events are really tough to break even on or make a profit on unless you have a sponsor or underwriter.

The best thing we have found — the silver bullet for us — has been the Tyee Builder membership program.

That means consistently having routines and rituals through which you regularly highlight and invite people to become Tyee Builder members. You’ll see that all over our site. There are all different kinds of calls to action in basically everything we put out.

We have a dedicated position and an internal team of people regularly looking at performance — the conversion rate of people from casual reader to free newsletter subscriber to Tyee Builder.

It’s called the audience engagement funnel. That’s very, very important for us. We’re looking at that constantly.

Then we run dedicated campaigns twice a year, where we share a goal we’re trying to reach with our readers and encourage them to sign up to help us reach that goal.

What has been very important for us is putting a heavy emphasis on people signing up on a recurring basis, either annually or monthly.

Of course, it’s a pay-what-you-want, when-you-want model. We accept and are very grateful for one-time contributions. Some people are simply not going to make recurring contributions, and that’s fine. We will gladly accept one-time contributions.

But we encourage people and make the case for recurring contributions. That is the best thing because if you are running an organization that has staff on payroll, you have to pay your staff every month.

You need to be able to predict what’s coming in every month. If you get good enough at predicting what’s happening, and you work on your churn rate — figuring out if you have a really leaky bucket and people are going out the bottom, and how to tighten that up — then you can work on your retention levels.

That is the best thing for an organization because every year we bring in more people and increase our recurring givers.

That allows us to project into the future and actually support staff positions, which is what you want.

When I project into the future, I know what floor we have because of our recurring contributions. I don’t have to start from zero every year and just hope that everyone renews. That’s a really stressful place to be.

As much as possible, going for recurring contributions is what you want to do.

Do you feel that reader-supported journalism can become too responsive to the preferences of its strongest supporters? How do you preserve editorial independence from the people paying the bills?

That’s the issue of audience capture. Luckily, our readership is very wide and diverse, and they don’t all agree with each other anyway.

People will worry that there will be a big organizing campaign among their members to force a change in editorial, and that’s never been the case for us.

People can become Tyee Builders for all kinds of reasons. Some are interested in our culture coverage and aren’t actually big on current events. Some are totally political animals and are into our politics coverage. Some are into our health and labor coverage. The readership is quite diverse.

You can’t please everybody.

Having this membership program, with so many people giving $10 or $15 a month, is the best protection.

You might have published something, especially if it’s an opinion or analysis piece, that people don’t agree with. We can expect some of what we call “angry quits.”

But because they’re such a big group of people, losing 10 people on any given day is not existential.

Whereas if you are supported by just a few large donors, pissing off one of them could be existential. Having a broad base of members paying a small amount is the best hedge against that.

But we’re not just guided by money. If we see a big wave of people quitting, and they are writing to us and telling us why, we’re always looking for the kernel of truth.

Do they have a point? Is it something we should be considering irrespective of whether or not we’re gaining or losing money?

We always try to look for the kernel of truth, accept criticism in good faith, and then you just have to use your own judgment and stay true to what’s important to you as a newsroom.

Did we mess up? Is there something that we missed? Or is this just a fair disagreement, but we actually did a good job?

When you look at struggling news organizations, do you think their biggest problem is lack of audience, lack of revenue, lack of trust, or something else?

There are a lot of very bright lights and people who are starting these organizations, and they’re very entrepreneurial. I know lots of peers in the industry.

What can be really tough is if people don’t have the starting capital to build something up and show the world what they can do in order to get that reader support coming in.

The Tyee had investors early on, and we received a transformative investment in 2018 to show more proof of concept, improve the quality and quantity of what we were doing and become a fixture in people’s everyday lives.

When we do a reader revenue campaign, there’s a subtle question in all of that, which is: Would the world be worse off — would your world be worse off — if The Tyee didn’t exist?

People have to enthusiastically want your publication to still exist in order to start shelling out money.

I think it can be really tough if people are trying to do both of those things at the same time, when they are not yet part of people’s everyday lives.

It doesn’t mean they won’t be. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be. But they don’t have that runway of a large investment of upfront capital to allow them to have a few years to establish themselves.

You need that upfront cash from somebody, or a group of people have to work for free for a long time, and that’s not something that a lot of working people without access to capital can do.

There’s obviously enormous pessimism about the economics of journalism right now. After your time at The Tyee and seeing it grow, what makes you optimistic, and what still worries you?

The Tyee Builder program is our heart and soul, and there’s still so much growth there.

When I started in 2014, I think we were bringing in under $100,000 a year from that program. We’re ending 2026 looking to close at about $1.6 million just from the Tyee Builder program, and it’s still growing in double digits every year — 10 to 15 percent growth just in the Tyee Builder program.

We have oriented the organization around that. We have good playbooks to run our campaigns, and that feels good because this is something where we have some control. That is an outcome of our actions.

That’s feeling really good, and I know this can work for other organizations. I’ve seen others do it.

It doesn’t work for every kind of organization, but I’m such a believer in this model, and I think it’s the way forward.

As long as that keeps going really well, I think we’ll be in good stead.

We manage our finances very carefully. We want sustainable and responsible growth. We have a much larger staff team now. It’s in a good position, and we want that good position to keep going.

Bringing calm and peace and sustainable growth to the organization is really what we want.

Journalism’s relationship to other platforms is always fraught, or has been fraught for a long time.

I had a pretty front-row seat to the Online News Act and the creation of that law, and that reflects the tense relationship between platforms and journalism organizations.

The content we publish is of great value to these platforms, but the guaranteed income coming back to the organizations to sustain that work is something you just can’t count on. It’s pennies on the dollar compared with what the old model used to bring in.

The latest thing on my mind — and I do not know how to reconcile this, and I see different news organizations doing wildly different things — is large language models.

If we are a nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization, and we publish without a paywall on purpose because we want our journalism to reach as far and wide as possible, then if people are looking for information in AI chatbots, we want to be there.

We want our credible, fact-checked, accountable journalism showing up when people are looking for information.

But that strategy has worked to sustain the organization when we can be attributed as the author, when people form a relationship with us as the source, when people come to our media property and get on our email newsletter.

We’ve seen again and again these new platforms spring up and gather a lot of users, and journalism organizations are encouraged to set up shop there and create content for these platforms.

But then essentially what happens is you become an unpaid content creator helping the network effects of these platforms. It’s the enshittification cycle, right?

At first you get a big boost, but now you’ve left your access to and relationship with your own audience completely outside your control.

An algorithm change, which you will never be notified about, can completely wipe out your connection to your own audience.

There’s always this tug of war: Do we show up in these places? Do we cede more control of our relationship to these platforms, where our business interests aren’t always aligned? Or do we not show up in those places at all?

It’s irreconcilable, but it’s on my mind all the time.