Ricochet: Radically Mainstream

By Michael Lee-Murphy

The AP tells its reporters ‘keep it short’. Larger legacy media consistently misses or willfully ignores stories of major importance, like missing and murdered indigenous women. Whenever stories about Quebec appear in English media in the rest of the country, they are frustratingly tone deaf, alternating between alarmist and bored. Corruption and elections, corruption and elections.

Out of this morass comes a new project, Ricochet. A new bilingual journalism initiative – with its heart in Montreal, but facing the rest of the country, and firmly of the left – Ricochet needs money to get this done. Ricochet wants to pay reporters to spend time on a story and spend time finding the right threads to pull to understand how the garment is made. We’re hoping to do that with a new sustainable model of crowd funding, based on subscriptions to particular writers. But to get off the ground we need $75,000 dollars. This will pay rent for an office in Montreal, build a top-notch website, and pay a set of journalists and writers to produce early content.

Big names from the Canadian media world are already involved. Linda McQuaig, Judy Rebick, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, and Youngist’s own Muna Mire have all gotten on board in some form or another. I have written for the Youngist in the past, and I am hoping to head up a specialized area of coverage for Ricochet focusing on the border. We have other ambitious projects that seek to link reporting from across the country. Good reporting takes money, plain and simple. So take a look at our website, check out the Facebook page, and if you’re interested in the model we’re trying, please donate to our indiegogo.