October Kickstarts The Catch's First Official Subscriber-Drive
The Catch needs your help!
Support The Catch for our first ever subscriber-drive!
When I began The Catch in November of 2022, I had no idea what the purpose of my newsletter would be. The first few entries ran the gamut of Twitter nonsense, FIFA President Gianni Infantino's weird comments about being a redhead and even an album review. But even in those early days, news media criticism popped up regularly. Soon after, the newsletter became a weekly source of written critical analysis on Canadian news media.
In the past (nearly) four years, I've expanded The Catch into our weekly podcast The North State. We've published critical analyses on news media framing, industry dynamics and politics not found anywhere else in Canada. I've interviewed CANADALAND publisher Jesse Brown, spoke to those covering the RCMP/Amber Bracken news media trial in BC and repeatedly brought critical analysis of Canadian capitalism and how it affects our perception of the world.
Throughout it all, I've had a mental block in promoting my work outside of usual social media channels. "If the work is good (and I believe it is), it will find the right audience." Despite the fact that I routinely write about how news media and social media channels are stacked against such coverage, I didn't accept it myself.
Perhaps I still don't, but what I do know is that The Catch is something that I want to continue doing. In order to keep that momentum going, I need to ask for your help. If you're reading this in your inbox, the amount of gratitude I have for you is immense. If you pay to have this in your inbox, it's beyond words. But what I hope to do in October is to raise the amount of people who have future pieces in their inbox.
So that takes us to October. Throughout all of this month, I will be sending emails, posting on channels and mentioning on The North State for you to share this newsletter with your friends and consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you like the work I do, then I hope you're willing to recommend it to your circles. Write podcast reviews in your app of choice, forward emails and podcasts to others. Mention it in real life conversations. Anything helps.
This is my first official fundraising initiative for The Catch and as a result my goals are modest. At time of writing, we have 339 free readers and 17 paid readers, for a total of 356.
I would like to reach 30 paid readers and 500 total readers by the end of October.
Asking for 13 more paid readers and 161 more free readers may not seem like a lot. But I want to know the power of this subscriber base. Open rates of newsletters are disproportionately high for the industry and The North State has a reliable listener-base. But as always, I'm DIY-ing it. So if you think this is a reasonable ask, help us reach it.
To that end, there's another exciting announcement: The Catch is doing its first ever live event.
Three Years of October: How Israel's Genocide Revealed and Radicalized Canadian News Media
Since the October 7 attacks, multiple reports have been released on the Israeli bias at play in legacy news outlets, including CTV News, CBC News and Global News. However, coverage surrounding events like the Nakba exhibit at the Human Rights Museum and the antisemitic shooting of a synagogue in Belleville, Ontario has shown that news has radicalized in some aspects. Senior Editor for The Breach Desmond Cole, founder and managing editor at On the Line Media Samira Mohyeddin and associate professor at the School of Journalism at the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University Sonya Fatah bring their experience, expertise and analysis to the Danu Social House to dissect the issue and discuss how to improve Canada's media landscape.
When: October 27, 7:00pm
Where: Danu Social House, 1237 Queen Street West Toronto, ON M6K 1L4
Want to hear me answer some of your questions? Today, Eric Wickham, Ontario reporter for PressProgress joins me on The North State to do exactly that.
Thank you so much for all your support and I look forward to what we can achieve together.
