“Nobody knows anything,” Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman once said. He was referring to the impossibility of predicting a box office hit. The internet is no less fickle. Some stories you pour everything into barely make a ripple. Others tossed out as a long shot end up dominating your site for days.
Last August, we published an investigation on the cruise industry’s push into Lake Superior. Leah Borts-Kuperman reported on how luxury vessels, drawn by the area’s austere beauty, are bringing economic gains to towns like Thunder Bay while wreaking environmental havoc. With up to 3,000 passengers aboard, these ships can generate 1,000 tonnes of waste daily. Does this kind of well-heeled tourism belong in one of the world’s great lakes? Should our most pristine spaces be up for sale?
The story rapidly became one of our most-read pieces of 2024, with people clicking in from across the country. Most interesting, and instructive, were the livid emails from a tourism manager quoted in the article. He was upset our writer didn’t include the many upbeat talking points he gifted her. He went on to report us to the National NewsMedia Council, a news ethics body.
Here’s what became clear: media in the Thunder Bay region has so deteriorated that our story was one of the first to honestly examine the impact of these floating hotels. If cruising regulations have grown lax, Canadian journalism has as well. Borts-Kuperman stepped in to fill the gap once occupied by local reporting.
We started digging into other data points in our traffic and noticed a pattern. When we explored Montreal’s bold experiment with car-free streets, or exposed the failures of emergency shelters in Whitehorse, or praised the efficiency of traffic roundabouts in PEI, the response was immediate. Readers weren’t just drawn to national headlines. They were engaging with pieces that explained structural shifts in their own communities. Better yet, readers from other regions were interested as well.
Nobody knows anything—except when they do. The secret, it seemed, was going granular—specific voices telling specific stories about specific communities. Canadians, to quote from Tom Jokinen’s feature in this issue about the rise of micro newsrooms, don’t care about “the doom-and-gloom ‘future of journalism’ debates. They care about where and how they live, what it costs, who’s left out, who’s telling the truth, and who’s lying.”
To meet that demand, The Walrus with support from The Chawkers Foundation is building a network of six regional bureaus, covering the West, the North, Atlantic Canada, the Prairies, Ontario, and Quebec. The first three bureaus launch this year, with the rest to follow in 2026.
The correspondents will be tasked with bringing their embedded perspectives to our national and international platform. But for this to work—for these bureaus to not just launch but last—we need your support. If you want to see more journalism that understands a place because it comes from there, I invite you to be a part of this effort and help us anchor reporting where it’s needed most.
Graham Roumieu (roumieu.com) is a National Magazine Award winner and a regular contributor to The Walrus. He draws for The Atlanticthe New York Timesand the Wall Street Journal.
