The Narwhal finds its niche

Denise Balkissoon is executive editor of The Narwhal, an independent nonprofit newsroom devoted to environmental and natural-resource journalism in Canada. She spoke with Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau about the freedom and strain of the nonprofit model, the regional reporting that has built The Narwhal’s audience, and the importance of approaching polarized environmental issues with complexity and respect. She also discussed revenue, newsroom trust and why local relationships matter even more as public records become harder to obtain and AI-generated material spreads online.

Before we get into The Narwhal, could you give me the short version of your path through journalism and what ultimately brought you to this organization?

I went to journalism school at Carleton University in Ottawa. My first job was at a city magazine in Toronto, and I freelanced for quite a long time. I did a year at the Toronto Star. I was at The Globe and Mail, which is a big national newspaper in Canada, where I did a bunch of different jobs. I was a columnist, a reporter, and an editor, and I hosted a podcast. Then I moved to Chatelaine, a 98-year-old women’s magazine in Canada, and then I came to The Narwhal.

The Narwhal is almost 10 years old, but it’s still a young, small newsroom. One way we get the word out that we exist is by collaborating with older or bigger outlets. I worked on a collaborative story at Chatelaine with The Narwhal, and that’s how I met the team here. When they were launching a bureau in Ontario, they asked me to join, and it seemed really exciting.

It felt meaningful to work on environmental journalism. I’ve always liked to take risks, and at older, bigger publications, that’s not always welcome. It was exciting to be somewhere without all the things that had come before. There were a lot of things that had never been done, so why not do more of them?

As you said, those larger, more traditional publications are different from The Narwhal. What does a nonprofit newsroom offer that isn’t possible in those environments, besides the freedom to take more risks in your reporting?

Part of that freedom is that there are no owners. Most media owners are millionaires or billionaires, and they have interests of their own. I have felt that, even when it isn’t overt, those interests can shape coverage areas or how things are covered at legacy publications.

We don’t have any billionaires or millionaires we’re beholden to. The Narwhal is funded about 40-something percent by members, people who donate what they can. Just over 40 percent comes from philanthropic foundations, some interested in environmental issues and others interested in democracy and journalism’s role in a thriving democracy. About 10 percent comes from tax credits and similar sources.

That means we can go where our interests and expertise are, and where our audience’s interests are, instead of following what has always been done at a publication or what its focus has been for decades.

In the eight years The Narwhal has been around, have you found nonprofit journalism to be a sustainable model?

So far, it has been. One reason The Narwhal was launched was the feeling that there wasn’t much quality environmental journalism in Canada. With every beat, it’s a chicken-and-egg question: Are people interested, or are they not interested because no one is serving them that kind of journalism?

Our growth in readership and membership took off like a rocket from the beginning. When you go from five people to 10, that’s 100 percent growth. We’re not growing 100 percent the way we were, but growth is still pretty steady, and that shows that people in Canada want this kind of journalism.

We are a country that is heavily dependent on resource industries, and that brings many environmental and sustainability conversations that simply weren’t being had. I really think we have helped open some of them up.

Are you able to build a genuine community around an issue or mission rather than simply a geographic location?

A couple of stories have really taken off. One of the first, before I was here, was about a new hydroelectric dam in British Columbia called Site C. It involved flooding some very fertile farmland as well as Indigenous territory. The Narwhal was the only publication covering it regularly, rather than doing a story here and there, and that built a huge audience in British Columbia.

When we first started in Ontario, the issue people really held onto was the provincial government’s move to open parts of the Greenbelt. The Greenbelt is a ring of farmland, forest and wetland around the Greater Toronto Area, the most populated part of the country. Protecting its headwaters and farmland is incredibly important, and it has been protected for more than 20 years. Then the provincial government moved to lift some of those protections.

Our team, working with the Toronto Star, found that many of the large parcels where the government proposed lifting environmental protections were owned by people with different kinds of connections to the government, whether as donors or something else. That galvanized an audience and other journalists in Ontario, and it became one of the province’s biggest stories for a couple of years. To this day, new members tell us the Greenbelt coverage is one reason they decided to give us money.

Canada is a massive country, and sometimes it can be hard to build those communities by region, but we try to report locally and get on the ground where we can. Matt Simmons is a reporter in northwestern British Columbia, and he has built an audience in a very small place that is being completely transformed by liquefied natural gas. We also have a newer reporter in northern Ontario who is going to write about mining. Mining is an international geopolitical issue right now, but she is covering it in very local ways, and people seem to appreciate that.

Environmental reporting can get highly technical and even abstract. How do you make subjects such as mining or climate policy feel local and consequential to someone’s everyday life?

I really believe in hand-holding, and I say that to our staff all the time. When you’re talking about complicated subjects to very busy people, it’s important to over-explain in a way that isn’t condescending but is very clear.

In terms of making stories relevant, the question is: How is this issue or policy going to affect my life? With Site C, it was whether local food would become scarcer and whether food security would be affected because farmland was being flooded. With the Greenbelt, it was very similar. It involved farmland, the headwaters of many of the lakes we drink from and specific endangered animals people really care about.

We try very hard to get on the ground, especially in remote places most people will never visit themselves. It’s very expensive, and there’s often nowhere to stay, but it really shows a landscape and what’s at stake in a way that a story without amazing photography can’t. Photography has always been one way we try to form that personal connection.

It also matters to have journalists who are from these places and know them. Our Alberta team is in the heart of Canada’s oil and gas country. There are a lot of opinions, stereotypes and dismissiveness on both sides of that conversation. It’s important to have a team that doesn’t approach it from a simple lefty environmental perspective, but thinks about people whose families have worked in oil and gas for generations and what that means economically.

We do many stories about people’s divided feelings toward oil and gas. Everyone in Alberta knows someone who makes a living that way, but the industry is also hurting farms, farmland and farm animals. It’s a complicated issue, and we try to tell it in a complicated rather than simplistic way.

You talk about rebuilding relationships with audiences at a time when trust in traditional journalism has weakened. What does a smaller independent newsroom have to do differently to earn that trust?

We are more able to have a personal connection because there are fewer of us. We’re still small and publish about two stories a day. We read every email that comes into our editors’ inbox. At bigger publications, sometimes the volume simply can’t be handled.

We have held in-person events in different places where members can come meet us. Because there are relatively few of them and few of us, we can sit down and have a pub night with people.

Anything environmental is purposefully being polarized, and we try very hard to dampen that. We are not here to tell a simple story about resource extraction. It’s complicated, and we like to think that builds trust. People might be surprised by how we approach a story.

One example involved logging on Vancouver Island. There was a protest over old-growth logging, but the story we told was about the First Nation whose territory it was. Its members were saying, “Can you guys get out of here so we can figure it out? We believe in sustainable logging as one of the economic legs of our community.” Sometimes we tell stories that upset a traditional environmentalist audience because people assume our job is simply to oppose all these things.

I believe the only way to take on big environmental issues is to bring as many people along as possible, and you’re only going to do that by being respectful of them.

The Narwhal has made equity part of its journalism rather than treating it as a separate newsroom initiative. How does thinking about who gets covered and who gets to do the covering change the stories you find?

It changes them very much, especially on this beat. It is a pursuit of equity, but it is also simply truth and good journalism to examine the links between Indigenous communities, Indigenous displacement and any kind of environmental protection, especially in Canada, where communities have been forced off their land for centuries to make resource extraction possible.

The work of bringing people back to their communities and allowing them to revitalize and steward the land as they want is an equity or human-rights issue. It is also about protecting the land itself and protecting ecosystems.

That has always been key to The Narwhal’s coverage. We have a focus on Indigenous-led conservation overseen by a specific editor, and we try very hard to have Indigenous journalists on staff at all times. We just made a permanent hire of one of our Indigenous fellows from last year. It’s a great way to help someone grow her career, and she doesn’t have to tell only Indigenous stories. She is going to get out there and cover policy, which she wants to do. But when she does tell Indigenous stories, there’s a connection that always makes the story better, just as our Alberta team’s connection to the province does.

Small nonprofit outlets are often praised for being nimble, but they also work with limited resources. What disadvantages of the model do people outside these organizations tend not to see?

A place where everyone does everything can be pretty tiring. Even today, one of my audience-team members sent me an email about signing up to learn how to do something, and I thought, “Do I have to learn how to do this? Can that be in someone else’s bucket?” But the answer is no, because when your team is so small, someone else has to be able to step in if a colleague is on vacation. We have specific areas of expertise, but there is still a lot of everyone doing everything, which can feel very hectic.

Growth has also been a big challenge. We’re 30 people now, but we started as two. We’re moving from a place where everyone knows everything to one where we have to learn to trust each other to go into our own areas, carve out specific beats and run entire regional bureaus while trusting that it all fits together in a Narwhal way.

We’re also an almost fully remote newsroom. Sometimes it takes extra effort to communicate properly and form a connection with colleagues whom, at best, we will see in person twice a year. That takes some tending as well.

Is there a danger that nonprofit newsrooms become too dependent on foundations or major donors? How do you diversify revenue without creating some of the pressures nonprofit journalism was supposed to escape?

Right now, it feels pretty good that our funding is divided fairly evenly between foundations and individuals. More individual support would be better, and that’s definitely one of our goals. It’s also good that the foundations themselves have diverse interests. Many of the early ones, and many we have now, are focused on the environment. Others are more interested in democracy, policy or how industries influence policy.

If funders were hyper-focused on a specific environmental issue, the concern wouldn’t necessarily be direct influence. The funding could make your lane too narrow. If you have to do a specific number of stories about one body of water and a specific number about one industry, suddenly you don’t have that editorial freedom, not because of negative influence but because of the money you’re beholden to. We definitely try to keep it diverse. Right now, the balance feels pretty good.

How do you decide what success looks like? Is it readership, membership growth, a political response, a policy change, another newsroom picking up your reporting, or something else?

It’s all those things, and we use an impact tracker. It includes all the traditional analytics, as well as things like being mentioned by politicians in the House of Commons. Policy change is probably the Holy Grail. It’s the hardest thing to achieve, but it feels very important.

Republications are great. Collaborations with bigger newsrooms are very important for letting people know we exist, because we’re still really new. It’s wonderful when our journalists are invited onto different shows to discuss their stories. And, of course, if people decide they like us enough to give us some of their hard-earned dollars, that is also a great impact.

One reason I wanted to talk with you is that we’re doing a series examining whether organizations such as The Narwhal can fill the void created by shrinking newspapers and legacy newsrooms. Do you see nonprofit news as a supplement to traditional journalism or increasingly as one of its replacements?

The Globe and Mail launched its own nonprofit arm. It doesn’t necessarily publish on its own; right now, it is nurturing and focusing on photojournalists.

I think ProPublica is the gold standard in terms of the ambition and presentation of its stories, but it still needs legacy reach to bring those stories to as many people as possible.

People can really get down on legacy media, and I always say you don’t know what you’ll miss until it’s gone. The Toronto Star is my local paper. It has done things I don’t love, but its reporters have the closest eyes on City Hall, and I’m not going to pretend that isn’t true. Legacy outlets still have trust and reach. That’s why we want to work with them.

I think there’s space for both, and the tendency of nonprofit newsrooms to be a little bolder and edgier can only have a good effect on the industry as a whole.

You’ve written about why human reporting matters on an internet increasingly flooded with AI-generated material. Does that environment make deeply sourced local reporting more valuable, and are people going to gravitate toward it?

I think so. Even before the AI threat, we were already becoming complacent about how often politicians and governments simply don’t answer us. It seems to me to be much worse in Canada than in the United States. They just don’t respond. They don’t acknowledge you at any level of government. Freedom-of-information processes across the country are becoming tighter, more locked down, and more secretive.

On one hand, I’ve wondered whether, if we aren’t getting what we need from freedom-of-information requests, we should use this big AI mind to comb through all the data that is out there and help us figure things out. Maybe the answer is there in plain sight. I don’t have much experience with AI. I’m a reluctant user, but I am starting to understand that possibility.

Still, relationships are always going to be at the heart of journalism. With the crackdown on freedom of information, local reporters who attend every city council meeting, or are on Parliament Hill all the time build trust with whistleblowers. Their presence also helps governments understand that they don’t get to avoid answering questions.

When we try to bridge divides and tell complicated stories, those relationships help people understand that our stories aren’t going to be a gotcha. We are also experimenting with AI voicing for some of our stories. The editors working on it have talked about how hard it is to get the stress on the right word. It still sounds artificial and robotic, and people aren’t listening to it. There’s a huge AI backlash, and I have hope for that.

If someone wanted to build an independent community or nonprofit newsroom today, what is the one thing you would tell them to figure out before publishing their first story?

You should know how what you’re doing is genuinely different from what already exists and what needs it will serve. There are many gaps in the journalism landscape. I launched a little blog with friends years ago, and it was nowhere near as successful as The Narwhal, but the immediate audience at the time showed that if you see a gap, other people are probably feeling it too. If you know what that gap is and what makes you unique, you are more likely to succeed.