I was on 1310 News this morning. You can listen to the interview here. 

I was on Danielle's show this afternoon to discuss one of my recent columns. You can listen to it here.  

In a National Post debate my editorial board colleague Jen Gerson, Matt Gurney and Jesse Kline and I discuss the meaning and limits of “press freedom” when police and courts seek information from journalists.

An amusing item from the latest Landowner magazine on how government works... or tries to.

Brigitte writes:

As some of you may know (and if you don’t, you can find out more about it here), CFRA radio in Ottawa redesigned their morning show and the new format did not include John. So after 17 years, that gig is off, and that means we are increasingly making our living online.

You may also have heard that the Ottawa Citizen was merging with the Ottawa Sun. This does not affect us, except insofar as it is yet another sign that traditional media outlets are slowly and painfully dying.

It’s not a very surprising development to anyone who’s been paying attention. The invention of the Internet made ad-supported media appear suddenly very lumpy and expensive. Why would advertisers pay to have their ads seen by fewer and fewer people who do their shopping online via search engines like Google or sites like Craiglist or Kijiji or whatever the kids use these days.

I strongly believe there is a bright future for news reporting, analysis and commentary, but not in the old traditional format that’s heavily dependent on ad revenues. I believe the future (well, at least for the next few years) is in user-supported media. That’s media that users pay for – either by buying the product or by sponsoring the creators, or both.

When Sun News went kaput last year John and I decided to devote ourselves to documentary film-making and to finance our films through crowdfunding. We also set up our websites to take monthly contributions from people who like what we do so we could keep doing more of it. (Something our friend Nick Vandergragt is also doing – you can sponsor his work here.)

It’s still a relatively new model, especially in Canada. So much so that there is still no option to work in Canadian dollars – only USD at the moment. But I trust someday soon demand from Canadian content creators for a system that accepts loonies will make it happen.

It’s a new funding model for creators and so far we’re very pleased by the response and grateful for the wonderful support we’re getting from our supporters.

We did also try last year to generate some revenues by putting ads on our websites and our videos. We got rid of the website ads a few months ago and this week I decided it was time to pull the plug on the YouTube ads as well. Not because they’re not working; they are. But personally when I want to watch a video or read an article I strongly dislike having to navigate around the ads and I’m assuming our readers and viewers feel the same… (By the way, if you come across an ad I somehow missed anywhere on my YouTube channel, please let me know.)

So there. Now we are patron-supported, and we find this a very dandy arrangement indeed. You get the product you want, you decide how much it is worth to you, and because we have lots of patrons who each give us small amounts of money each month, we feel we have the independence we need to keep doing our thing without having to worry about upsetting a big advertiser or angel investor.

There, I say, is the future. And I like it.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Al Siebring about our Constitution project. You can listen to the interview here.

Here we are!

Two documentary filmmakers are hoping to generate interest in the Magna Carta and in Canada’s constitution.

Presented by the Economic Education Association, Magna Carta: Good Then, Good Now features authors and journalists John Robson and Brigitte Pellerin doing a presentation on the Magna Carta and the importance of telling inspiring stories at home.

Robson and Pellerin, who are married, will each be giving their own talks throughout an evening at the Vic Juba Theatre.

“We will be talking about this project, reclaiming Canada’s heritage, so it will be partly about the Magna Carta, it will be partly about fixing the constitution, which today is a complete mess and we can do better than this,” Robson said. “My wife will be talking about reclaiming it at the dinner table, about how it’s so much more important to tell stories in the home than it is to run political ads and political campaigns.”

In addition to being a documentary filmmaker, Robson is a columnist with the National Post, a commentator-at-large for News Talk Radio 580 CFRA in Ottawa, and an Invited Professor at the University of Ottawa. Pellerin has over 15 years of experience in Canada’s media environment as a writer, producer, filmmaker, and multimedia entrepreneur.

Robson and Pellerin started working on a project about the Magna Carta two years ago, which resulted in the crowd-funded documentary Magna Carta: Our Shared Legacy of Liberty. Their presentations will be focused towards the third annual Essentials of Freedom Conference, which they will be attending on Feb. 26 and 27 in Edmonton.

“We’ve been letting the other side tell all the stories, and their stories aren’t very good, they’re not very attractive stories, but if they’re the only ones telling stories, then they are winning over the culture,” Robson said. “This is all connected with the documentaries and also with the conference and then we thought, well lets have a more public event and lets talk about this because there are a lot of people right now in Alberta who I think are getting an uneasy sense that something is wrong, very wrong in public policy in this country, and these are the people who often haven’t paid a whole lot of attention.”

Robson and Pellerin have collaborated on projects before, such as the radio show Thinking Aloud on Ottawa Radio in 2004, and have also worked on each other’s documentaries in the past. For the documentary on the Magna Carta they travelled together, did a lot of the editing together, while Pellerin did a lot of the shooting.

“She’s now the lead camera; it’s very much Robson/Pellerin production,” Robson said.

In addition to their Magna Carta project, Robson and Pellerin are working on a documentary on Canadian’s right to self-defence, which Robson said is all part of their reclaiming Canada’s heritage project, and to say Canadians are independent, self-reliant, and creative people.

Magna Carta: Good Then, Good Now will be presented on Monday, Feb. 29 at the Vic Juba Theatre at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 each, or $10 for students (18 and under). Tickets are available through the theatre box-office, online at www.vicjubatheatre.ca, or by calling 780-872-7400.

“We want them to tell the story of Canada with a smile,” Robson said what he hopes people will takes away from the Magna Carta presentations. “We want people to understand that the situation is difficult, but not to become discouraged or angry, to say Canada is a great nation, we have a great history and we need to recapture this history, be proud of who we are, and that way we can reclaim our future and we should look upon this as hard work worth doing, we should be happy about this.”

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