After years on the corporate media hamster wheel, Cornelia Naylor and her colleagues are now masters of their own destinies.

This month, Naylor and three other local journalists — Mario Bartel, Janis Cleugh and Teresa McManus — launched their own news website and newsletter called Freshet News, focusing on Burnaby, New Westminster and the Tri-Cities.

The quartet were laid off in the spring when Glacier Media (now rebranded Lodestar Media) closed the New Westminster Record, Burnaby Now and Tri-City News, three long-standing local newspapers the company had previously turned into web-only publications.

Spurred on by local supporters and backed by their union, the journalists established a workers’ non-profit co-op to create a new community-focused publication. After months of preparatory work and outreach, Freshet News launched its website and weekly newsletter last week.

Running your own publication requires a whole new set of skills in addition to reporting and editing. Freshet’s reporters started writing stories in September, for example, but were confined to publishing on LinkedIn while hammering out tech issues.

Now that the outlet actually has its own website and platform, The Tyee’s Tyler Olsen spoke to Naylor about launching Freshet News, and the challenges of starting a new media outlet in the 2020s. Olsen and Naylor, who previously worked together at the Chilliwack Times, spoke about the existential angst of journalism, optimism for the future and whether consensus decision-making can work in journalism. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Cornelia, what do you hope Freshet News becomes to the readers and people in the communities you’re serving?

Cornelia Naylor: We hope it becomes a connecting point, for one thing. In this very divisive age, we have come to think more and more about local news as a place where you can find connection by telling the community’s stories, like those really nice community features about funny animal things or community events, bringing people together, that’s one thing; and to keep them informed about what’s happening at city hall or in the courts or with the school board — all of those different public institutions that make up the bedrock of our democracy.

Running a publication with scarce resources means you have to decide what you’re going to cover, obviously, but also what you’re not going to cover. How are you thinking that through and how are you making decisions about where to invest your time and effort?

We hope to become really engaged with the community on a level that we really weren’t before as a corporate media outlet. We hope that we’re going to get more reader engagement. We’re looking at different membership models that we could pursue as a co-op.

We’re still working through that, and we hope to get more input from the community about what they want covered, and what their priorities are. What we’ve heard is that people want to know what’s going on in their communities — like just events. That kind of surprised me because you’d think you’d be able to just find those online, but people want that curated. They want it in a central place, and we can be that place. And secondly, they wanted municipal coverage, which also was a bit surprising, because that isn’t what we were encouraged to focus on [by Glacier Media] because it didn’t get all the hits online, the engagement online.

Over the summer, Freshet News’ four reporters appeared at a variety of community events to drum up awareness of their new publication. Photo submitted.

You’re a non-profit co-op. How does that work? What does that mean? Who owns this thing, and who makes the decisions and who’s the boss?

Currently we are what’s called a worker-owned co-op. And that means that I, Cornelia Naylor, former Burnaby News reporter, and Theresa McManus, longtime former New Westminster Record reporter, and Janis Cleugh and Mario Bartel, longtime Tri-City News reporters, we are the founding members, so we are the ones who make decisions in consensus at this point.

There may come a time where we need to hire people that have certain areas of expertise — organizing the office, ad sales, that kind of thing — and those people will have an opportunity under our model to become members. But they don’t need to. If they just want to do their job and go home, then they’ll be employees of the co-op, and we will be their bosses. So right now, we have no bosses except ourselves as four journalists.

Journalists don’t always agree with one another. How do you resolve disagreements, whether it be about how stories are written or how you spend resources or any of the other things that journalism operators have to figure out?

Because we’re such a new and small organization, it’s been relatively easy to make decisions in consensus. But we will have bylaws in place, procedures in place, policies in place to help with that.

For us currently, it’s really made a difference that all of us are longtime local news reporters. We’re not some people coming from dailies or radio and TV or a national newspaper. With our priorities and the way that we go about the bread-and-butter business of doing local journalism, we’ve found that we’re mostly on the same page.

Maybe our first test was our decision about the name. We had some discussions earlier about a different name that some of us thought came with some baggage, and some people were pretty firm on that, and we decided to go with something completely different. And that’s how Freshet became our name. That was a discussion over several days, and we came through that unscathed, and I think better able to just practise in how, when we disagree, how we’re going to talk about it, and how we’re going to come to consensus.

How different is that from your previous experiences in newsrooms and publications?

It’s a huge difference, because the reality in a corporate structure is that you don’t make all of the decisions. It’s one of the things I love about being a journalist. You’re told, “Here’s your beat,” and then you have your own freedom to carve out how you do your work. But other than that, most decisions are above your head, and you are at leisure to bitch about them if you don’t like them. But you don’t need to make them, whereas when you’re in the co-op, there’s nobody to bitch about except yourselves.

There’s a lot of responsibility. One of the things I’m noticing when I’m filling up my day is I am very aware that there’s not anybody telling me what to do, and I need to decide for myself what I can accomplish in a day, or how I want to go about it, or what the quality of my work is.

Is that a bit scary?

That part is not as scary because there is accountability working with three other very competent, very productive journalists. In my case, I think the scary part is more because none of us are entrepreneurs or business people.

You and I have both worked for publications that have not succeeded financially, including one, the Chilliwack Times, that is no longer with us. How does that experience with the fraught finances of journalism play on all your minds when you’re launching a new publication?

We definitely have lots of experience with failed journalism ventures both in the corporate world and with independent ventures.

But one of the things that has made me more and more confident that we will be viable and sustainable one day is the co-op non-profit model that we’ve picked. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make money. You definitely do. But the fact that we don’t have to be beholden to corporate shareholders, the fact that we don’t need to be servicing corporate debt, that is helpful. We think we can become sustainable and once we become viable, we can use economies of scale. We hope to be a model for other places so if there’s a town that’s losing its paper that may not be able to make it on its own, we can share resources, maybe ad sales, maybe printing. The more we grow this, the more sustainable it becomes.

The challenge is just getting ourselves off the ground, but the vision is bigger than that.

How do you get readers and advertisers to pay for journalism these days?

We’re going to be traditional. We’re going to sell ads online and in our newsletter. Then we’re going to pursue grants. And memberships and subscriptions. Since our launch, it’s been very encouraging how many people have — without us even really advertising or doing anything — reached out to us to advertise on our website. We don’t think that, in itself, is going to be sustainable. That’s why we’re hoping to launch a print product.

We believe, and we’ve heard from people who worked in the industry in ad sales on the business side of things, that they believe Glacier Media pulled the plug on print too early, and that people stopped advertising altogether. They did not move over to the digital product, and that there was a lot of money left on the table. So that’s one of the things we’re hopeful about. Of course, we don’t know until we get there.

A print product is a very ambitious stretch goal. How will you figure out when to take that leap?

We’re getting some good advice from people who know the industry. They shall remain nameless for now, and they have given us some confidence that this could work. Your question is a good one, because it’s a matter of both timing and balance.

If websites could be a sustainable way to do local journalism, I feel like somebody would have figured that out by now. We don’t think that that’s possible, and we think that we have to take that risk moving from digital only to print because there are advertisers who want print, especially locally. I think we’re in a different position as a local publication. I think people want it.

Local businesses in the community want the permanence of a print ad [and they want to] reach only their local audience. We’ve heard from local businesses that they want a print product. Also readers are excited about the idea. When we go to community events, people are so excited when we talk about the print product and it’s not just the older demographic. Younger people are excited about it too. We think it’s because you can finish it. You can hold it in your hand. You can put it down after you’re done. It’s a little different than reading the news on your screen and being distracted by all kinds of other stuff.

Is there something about Burnaby, New Westminster and Tri-Cities that might be particularly well suited towards a product like that? How do you think about your specific geographical region and coverage area and how it influences how you create and distribute news?

Local news is disappearing at an alarming rate. We know that suburban areas like ours are hit particularly hard.

There is a news desert here right now. There has been nobody covering these communities since April or May, and I think that works to our advantage. That’s why I’m confident that we can become sustainable and that we’ll get enough public interest. The other outlets, the Vancouver publications, will skim the surface.

If something interesting happens in the city, yes, they’ll come and cover it, and they’ll kind of cherry-pick the city council agenda or different kinds of crime, but what our people really want is that news coverage where you’re looking at committee meetings, you’re consistently covering those things. You’ve got the connections at city hall and in the school board and with the police and in the courts that can help you to really break those stories.

That’s why local news is so important. We’re the ones with boots on the ground uncovering stories that, in the past, places like the Vancouver Sun and the Province and the CBC would pick up on and follow and expand on.

One of the strengths of print is that you can actually deliver to people, and you don’t have to hope that people come across it. But you’re starting online. How does the news ban on Meta and Facebook impact a new publication’s ability to make itself known to readers?

It is a struggle. I know I can’t find my stories online right now basically unless I visit the website itself. We’re hoping our relentless outreach into the community will create a groundswell in the community. We don’t need for people to be reading us across Canada in the way that some online-only publications do. I think that’s the beauty of really being ultra-local, is we want our local readers and hopefully those are the people who are subscribing to our newsletters and who are already interested in our website.

Finally, on a personal level, going from the community newspaper world that you and I come from, in which you hope to be the last one to get chewed up by the buzz saw of closures and layoffs, what has it been like to put your energy into something that’s aimed at growth where, if it fails, it’s more your fault than anybody else’s?

It’s really exciting. It’s very motivating to hear the journalism community is really excited. They’re a cynical group of people, given the outlook for journalism, but they’ve been really supportive and really happy that we’re even giving this a shot.

Our co-op non-profit is not unique. A similar thing has been successful in Quebec. There were six daily newspapers that the corporate owner was going to shut down, and they formed a co-op to save them and those publications are still going.

In terms of the actual reporting grind, one thing that I’m finding that we as a group are struggling with is not getting back on the hamster wheel of feeling that we need to churn out content the way we were expected to do under our last corporate owners, who were really pushing just more content that’s going to get clicked. We actually have to pull back and say, “Nobody’s telling us to get on this hamster wheel. We just have to do good journalism.”

I feel less existentially angsty. By the end of the Burnaby Now, we were working from home, we didn’t have an office, we weren’t given a lot of editorial direction, and we felt like we were really just content machines. And that was making me feel like I didn’t know why I was doing this job anymore. This is a very different feeling. The stories that we care about, we can pursue. Nobody’s stopping us because they don’t get enough clicks online. And we feel there’s a future.