Cash from every corner: Three kooky ways Vancouver’s Tyee pays for top-shelf regional journalism
If “diversified revenue” is journalism’s newest cliché, I dare you to dig up a better anecdote than The Tyee, an oddly named gem in Vancouver, B.C.
The seven-year-old online newsmagazine, which pounds out left-leaning daily content with a Slate-y verve, has six full-time employees, 20 regular freelancers, a Gawkeresque rainbow of branded sections, and the kookiest revenue cluster I’ve ever seen.
I met Tyee editor and co-founder David Beers earlier this year at a Seattle journalism conference where he said he’d come to promote The Tyee as a model of sustainable, award-winning web-based reporting.
You might squirm at some of their funding — read on! — but Beers and his team are clearly on to something. According to Beers, their operation’s annual revenue of about $500,000 to $600,000 includes $450,000 from ongoing sale of equity, $75,000 from advertising, $50,000 from grants, $25,000 from reader donations, and (my favorite) a few thousand bucks from renting out newsroom desks to people they don’t know.
(We’ve been hoping to get exact figures, but go figure: Tyee business editor Michelle Hoar has been too swamped with work around their latest venture, a nonprofit arm called the Tyee Solutions Society, to pull totals together.)
Here are three revenue tricks Beers, Hoar and their team are hoping other innovators will steal:


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The Gazette’s plan for




