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Talking about The Tyee with people these days is a delight.
For those in and around the journalism industry, the default assumption is that running a news publication nowadays is a doomed enterprise. It’s common for seemingly successful outlets to suddenly announce that they are shutting down, and for extremely talented journalists to share on social media that they are affected in a round of layoffs.
So when we get to tell people that for The Tyee, our recent experience is quite the opposite, the look of relief and confusion on people’s faces is very fun. Especially when we add that The Tyee doesn’t have a paywall and our articles are open for all to read.
“But... how?”
The short answer is our Tyee Builders program, in which readers of The Tyee sign up to contribute an amount of their choosing to fund our operations. In 2024, we cruised past a meaningful milestone — over 10,000 people contributed money through the program. That’s about 10 times the number of people who gave to us a decade ago, and accounts for our ability to hire more staff and bring stability and sustainability to our non-profit organization.
But the truth is that just opening a membership program isn’t enough. To make the case that our work is worth supporting, our journalism team needs to show up every single day and publish in-depth work that can’t be read anywhere else. Ideally, we get into a “virtuous circle” — increased support means we hire more journalists, who do more great work and reach a wider audience, and some of those people sign on to support us, and the cycle goes up and up.
That’s what we’ve done, and what we continue to do. We don’t solely rely on our Tyee Builders program to fund our operations — our mixed model includes Tyee Builder revenue, private donations, grants, advertising and some government support.* But it accounts for most of our growth.
Because we’ve asked our readers to partner with us in this way, to help us sustain and grow, we think it’s only fair to be transparent about our operations and the impact of our work. You’ll find all of that in our most recent impact report, available to read here.
Some highlights:
- Articles published in 2024: 1,258
- Visitors to The Tyee website: 3.4 million+
- People who contributed financially through the Tyee Builders program: 10,200
- New journalism jobs added to our team: two (plus one paid six-month fellowship)
You’ll also find behind-the-scenes profiles of journalists on our team, details about our solutions journalism projects and demonstrations of our public-interest journalism making real-world impact.
If you’re a Tyee Builder, thank you so much for helping us write this optimistic chapter in Canadian journalism. And if you’re a regular reader of The Tyee and would like to see us sustain long into the future and continue to grow, please consider joining Tyee Builders and sign up for an amount that works for you. You’ll be in very good company.
* Note: The Tyee maintains complete editorial independence from individual and institutional funders. Funding from the federal government comes through the Local Journalism Initiative, the refundable labour tax credit for qualified Canadian journalism organizations, and the Aid to Publishers program in the Canada Periodical Fund. ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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