Dave Bidini, Founder West End Phoenix on the Genesis, Launch and Evolution of a Much-Loved Toronto Community Newspaper.

[00:00:01] Go out your front door, turn left, turn right, turn left and there's this place where something really cool is going to be happening. Dave Badini is a man of many talents. Some of you may know him as a founding member of the Canadian rock band Ryo Statics.

[00:00:17] Others may have read one or more of his 13 books. Or you may have seen one of the two plays that he's written. Or one of the films he's written. Or maybe you've read some of his award-winning journalism. Or

[00:00:29] maybe you've read The West End Phoenix, the Toronto Community newspaper that he founded in 2017. Dave was a great guest for this episode and we're excited to share the conversation with you. Welcome, Dave. Thank you for joining us today. Yeah, great to be here.

[00:00:46] Your CV is deep and broad. You're a bit of a multi-hyphenate. So maybe you introduce yourself and we'll go from there. I just call myself a rhythm guitar player ultimately. I've done the cajillion things in different disciplines, but I don't know.

[00:01:00] I just feel kind of at the end of the day like that was my sort of main passageway into everything art. And yeah, when I close my eyes, that's how I see myself with a guitar in my hand, you know, playing chords, not leads.

[00:01:17] You've got a few books on the shelf as well and are also a publisher and which we're going to talk about today with The West End Phoenix. But I guess there's a rhythm to the madness in all of it.

[00:01:28] Let's go back to the genesis of The West End Phoenix. Why don't I pause and ask you to describe The West End Phoenix and then we're going to go to where did that all start and what's the journey been like?

[00:01:41] So how would you describe The West End Phoenix? I think the paper is sort of, I think it's a reinvention of the community newspaper. That was sort of the idea when we tackled it in the beginning or when the idea first kind of came to us.

[00:01:56] It was taking all of the kind of charming elements of your community newspaper, circa 1976, 1966, kind of this traditional thing and then figuring out a way that we could twist and squeeze

[00:02:11] and fuck with it for lack of a better term and not betray the spirit of those elements of a community newspaper. It can be a story about your butcher, but it can be written by Michael Winter or Claudia Day

[00:02:28] or Margaret Atwood or somebody like that. So the prose can be a little bit less utilitarian, I suppose, it can be a bit more poetic and the crossword can be written by a poet like ours is,

[00:02:40] Paul Vermeer, Schreitzer Crossword. So it was kind of taking the template for a community newspaper and then trying to drag it into 2024, 2017, which is when it started, which is always fun. I even found that with our band in a way, in the beginning, Rios statics,

[00:02:58] we sort of tried to take traditional folk idioms and then kind of infuse it with a modern sensibility. So it's really kind of not that different, but that was the idea for The West

[00:03:08] and Phoenix. And so let's go back to 2017. There is a genesis for every business, every paper. Where did it start? What was the moment where you went, hey, I think that now is the time

[00:03:22] and the West End is the right place for me to get this ball rolling? Yeah, there's a bit of a longer shadow there, a longer tail to that tail. I was in Yellowknife in 2015, I believe, writing a book. The book ended up being called Midnight Light.

[00:03:40] I wanted to write a city book about the North. I didn't want to write a book about being on the land. That subject is in the wrong hands when it comes to my experience. I get eaten by a bear,

[00:03:50] Neil, I can't. Not good on the land. It would be a novella. It's a very short lived story. But I thought cities in the North, I think are interesting and they're never really given

[00:04:01] their due when we write about the North. So as you know, there's a handful of cities. And I went to a literary festival in Yellowknife in 2015. I love the city. The city was so

[00:04:13] intriguing to me. A couple of reasons, one of which is the Dene population is so pronounced and so visible. And such a big part of how that city operates. So the accessibility to First Nations stories, First Nations people was at hand. And Yellowknife is also kind of

[00:04:31] a place where people escape to. So everybody has an interesting story of their new lives and their past lives. And you're never really sure where truth meets fiction. So I went there and I

[00:04:44] knew that I had to, I needed to know the city in relatively short order. There's ways of doing that. You can work street level in terms of advocacy and support work with homes population.

[00:04:56] You can be a volunteer firefighter. You can drive a drive hack or you could be a reporter. So I contacted the Yellowknife newspaper and asked if I could more or less embed with them. I know that's

[00:05:07] kind of a sexy word, but it really was work for them. And yeah, they welcomed me with open arms. So I worked as kind of a kind of masqueraded as a reporter. I was really doing, I was doing

[00:05:17] streeters. I was writing the entertainment news. I was even writing the weather for them. But I got to know the city quickly because reporters know places, they get into the guts of a place. So

[00:05:27] I did that. Came back, wrote the book. Well, I fell in love with the newspaper while I was up there. It was really fun being on the desk. And how long were you at the newspaper for?

[00:05:36] I was there for a summer, but the person that I became closest with in terms of the reporting force was a fellow named John McFadden. We were both in our 50s. Most of the other

[00:05:46] reporters were in their 20s. But while I was up there, John was arrested by the RCMP for obstructing a police investigation. And because he was, it meant that I was back and forth to Yellowknife over

[00:05:58] the course of 18 months, six or seven more times. So initially it was like, you know, five, six months up there, but I had to go up there to follow his trial. So that was the extent. And I was grateful for John, grateful to John for getting arrested,

[00:06:12] frankly, because it gave my book a solid narrative. And it also meant that I was able to go back and spend a lot more time in the city than I would have otherwise. You had a reason to return.

[00:06:24] Exactly. I wanted to find out how the story ended, right? So I came back home, wrote the book, and then sort of realized that I didn't have nearly as much fun writing the book. And

[00:06:34] books aren't fun to write anyways, but I didn't have nearly as much fun doing that as I did working for the newspaper. And then I looked around our catchment in the West End. And realized that all of the longstanding community newspapers have been bought by Metroland,

[00:06:46] which is sort of the governing corporate body for the Toronto Star at least was. And they'd, you know, gouged all content out of the community newspapers. They were glorified flyers basically, you know, the kind that, you know, were punted up to your onto your porch and

[00:07:00] then thrown immediately into the blue bin just because there's no content. They were glorified flyers and Canadian tire flyers and shoppers drug mart and that sort of thing. And I kind of thought, well, what if there's some, what if there's a thing that tumbles up on

[00:07:11] your porch that is something you actually can't wait to read that is bursting with great writing, great photography, great illustrations that really speaks to you. And so, you know, my birthday 2016, September 2016, I had like a dozen of my friends around the table in the backyard.

[00:07:28] And I sort of said, what about a community newspaper? And like most good friends, they were like, try it, like go for it, Dave. And I knocked on doors. I went across the neighbourhoods, sold 800 subscriptions before we'd had a single newspaper published or even a story assigned.

[00:07:45] And I knew there was an appetite for it. And it was really interesting to get people out on their porches talking about journalism, like I showed up, you know, with I think at fridge magnets,

[00:07:56] West End Phoenix, I know we digs I'm looking at one now it's on my fridge and told them about the paper and you know, they signed a bunch of people would sign up. And so it had that

[00:08:05] kind of momentum and it was really neat. You know, you knock on a door, you look through the curtains, you see who it is. Some people were like, that guy for the real statics, what's he

[00:08:13] doing on our porch? Oh, they would come out, I talked to them and then, you know, I think it was just it was really healthy to be talking to people about journalism, you know, on their porches.

[00:08:23] And so from there, that's the genesis of the paper. I really was trying to do in our local cashmint what the Yellenifer does for Yellenife, we just kind of amend that broken bond, I think,

[00:08:36] that did exist between newspapers and readers for a long time, but that has been tested. And I wanted to, yeah, kind of sew that back together. You've already started to answer my next question, which was okay, you're back, you finished the book, you've got this idea,

[00:08:51] you're knocking on doors, you've got 800 subscriptions. It's 2017, 2016, papers starting up and you're saying to people, we're going to do X, right? This is sort of the vision of the paper. How close, once you got the first issue in your hand, how close was

[00:09:10] issue number one or issue number one through 10? How close was that to what your original vision was? Or how did things change when you were going from idea to execution? Well, okay, let me answer the second part first because I think that'll be instructive to people

[00:09:29] listening, trying to figure out how it all came together. Well, first of all, I talked to as many people as possible about this idea. I met with, man, I met with dozens and dozens of people

[00:09:42] just presenting my idea basically. In some instances, I wanted them to support the newspaper. I wanted them to become donors, subscribers, advertisers. Margaret Atwood, she was one of my first calls and she wrote us a check for $10,000. She was the

[00:09:55] first person to give us any money to support what we were doing. But I play hockey with Christina Zeidler, who ran the Gladstone Hotel and told her about the paper and she was like,

[00:10:05] we offer artist residencies to a year and she asked us if we'd like one, we would have a space, an office for the paper. So we said yes, we ended up staying there for four years. I think

[00:10:16] John Moran, who runs West End Offset, who's one of the largest printing production, film production houses in the city. His dad ran a small print shop in the junction called West End Offset and he wanted to honor his father's print legacy in the West End

[00:10:32] by paying for our printing basically. So we had, by telling people about what we were doing, we ended up finding a space and we ended up finding somebody who would pay for our printing.

[00:10:40] So that was part of it. Like I really did my due diligence and I really tried to bring as many people under the umbrella at first. So that's kind of how that went down. In terms

[00:10:48] of the first issue, it was a magical night. Our launch at the Gladstone, we had the papers paraded in by a marching band and it was more like a New Orleans style kind of band. And our kids

[00:11:03] brought the papers in and most people, the first thing they did when they got their hands on the paper was smell them because they're such a distinct smell to newsprint. Looking back on it, it's like your first album. It's a reflection of the essence of the idea but

[00:11:20] you never want your first song to be your best song. You want it to grow into it. So I think we have grown into it. But there are elements, G is like our pet of the month and our crossword

[00:11:36] and a couple of other departments are still there. Seven years later, they're still part of the paper and stuff. So I think it was a fairly accurate reflection. I remember even walking up

[00:11:46] the street one day, this is before the, even before I gathered my friends night, my son would have been G's 13, 12 or 13. And I was like, you're my one-eyed thing to start a newspaper. And he was

[00:11:56] like, that's a cool idea. And so I thought, well, if a 12 year old thinks it's kind of a cool idea, maybe it is a cool idea. And maybe we're onto something. Oh, I love, and our

[00:12:07] readers, the ones that capture my imagination are the ones who tell me that the paper arrives at their home and their teenage daughter takes it and reads it in their room. And then it appears

[00:12:20] in the living room table five days later. And then their son takes it, takes it in his room, he reads it. And then finally, mom and dad get a chance to go through it. So it's great that

[00:12:31] all of the readers don't look like me. The younger generation, they've never had a many of them have never held a newspaper before. So it's nice to be able to bring that, bring that to them. There's always some moment in every one of these episodes where I think,

[00:12:46] you know, in the film about starting up the West End Phoenix, the scene with the New Orleans band is going to be, you know, that's going to be critical. But, you know, that experience of holding the paper and smelling the paper. And there's something that's so sensory about

[00:13:04] a newspaper. It's tactile, you can smell it, it exists in an analog very specific space and time. And I think there's a nostalgia element to that. I think that in today's kind of digital throwaway disposable momentary click, scroll age, even though the paper eventually gets recycled, there's

[00:13:24] a different level of permanence, I think, or import where decisions have been made that this is the content that we are going to send to the printers and commit to paper. That there's something about all of that, and then there's that element of the shared,

[00:13:40] I was going to say communal, but not everybody's reading the paper at the same time necessarily, but that shared experience of, you know, the paper getting passed around the household, which happens in our household when the West End Phoenix arrives. My 17-year-old grabs it,

[00:13:53] and then I read it, and my wife reads it. And we've all had a similar experience with that paper. I think there's something really important about it being printed. Yeah, occasionally I do songwriting workshops with students, and I always tell them, you know,

[00:14:15] when you're finished playing your guitar, say let's say your instrument of choice, when you're finished playing your guitar and writing your song or whatever, working on your song, like don't put your guitar back in its case. Like you want to walk into that room and you

[00:14:31] want that guitar to sort of say, hey man, what are you doing? You need some love. You want it calling to you. And the same is true of the newspaper. When we read something on the screen,

[00:14:42] and we've closed our laptop or we turn off our phone, it's gone. With the newspaper, it's on the table. Like it is in the home. It's reminding you to pick it up. And I think that's

[00:14:56] kind of important or different. I think it's what separates us. And the nice thing about the, we do deliveries mostly Saturday mornings. Sometimes the deliveries go up Friday night and sometimes Sunday morning. But people will have that newspaper in their hands when they wake up

[00:15:11] on Saturday mornings. And there is a community of readers, you know, and community is a word that's tossed around like a, you know, a two ton manhole cover. But a community of readers is

[00:15:21] really a thing and has been a thing for centuries. And when people ask me about, you know, community building and placemaking and all those kind of ochre terms, I don't have to twitch when I use those words because they are true and they do apply to our readership.

[00:15:37] Because you're right, like within a certain timeframe, everybody is reading that same story or more or less, right? They're all holding the paper. And the charming thing on social media for us is often people won't post photos of a certain story or whatever or tweet about a certain

[00:15:53] item in the paper. They'll post pictures of themselves reading the newspaper, which is really like so there's that really interesting engagement between the thing and the person who's engaging with the thing. And you know, that's another thing about, you know, I always appeal to

[00:16:11] subscribers like if you subscribe and I don't mean to diminish digital publishing, but when you subscribe to the West End Phoenix, we should give you a thing. Like it's not a link. It's not

[00:16:23] like it's not a post. It's a fucking thing. And listen, you can repurpose that thing too. There's many. Start a fire, you know, lay your hamster cage. Wrap a present. We get a lot of that

[00:16:35] at Christmas time too with old West End Phoenix people, right? So that I think separates us a little bit in terms of who we are and what we are. What hit you over the course of you got a

[00:16:49] birthday party in the backyard and now you've got a first issue? There's always something in that process that turns out to be surprisingly much harder than you imagined it to be as you're bringing issue number one to life. What were the parts of getting this thing off

[00:17:06] the ground that you maybe hadn't anticipated would be as challenging as they were? You know, we'd never made a newspaper before. We all worked in newspapers, you know, and it's interesting because of the decline of newspapers and because of the thinning of newsrooms

[00:17:24] and the downsizing of legacy media, we did have incredible talent kind of right outside our door, which was, you know, we were able to hire an excellent photo director, Jelani Morgan, an incredible art director, Robin Kalangelo, then Alicia Kowalewski. They'd all worked for

[00:17:42] big, big, big newspapers, big publishers. So the decline of the industry was actually to our benefit largely. But you know, there were things like the printing, you know, we were printed out of a

[00:17:55] legacy Hungarian printing shop in Etobicoke and that was a process to get them because they were used to printing, you know, Mr. Lube coloring books. They weren't really used to publishing these 30-inch broadsheet newspapers with freaky grade comics and beautiful photographs.

[00:18:12] And so that was a process to kind of bring them on side and let them know what we were looking for. I'd never had to deal with myself as a writer from a publisher's point of view or an editorial

[00:18:23] point of view, but man, some of those writers are high maintenance out there. So it was a little bit like, you know, you assign a story and it comes back to you completely differently. So, and that largely didn't fall on me. That fell on the editors,

[00:18:35] but it was also part of my job, I think to run a little bit of interference if I knew the writer or, you know, help mitigate those instances. Deadlines were hard to meet. And then there's

[00:18:46] a whole fundraising piece too and that's something I'd never done in my life ever before. Like looking for money was something I'd never done. So that was a massive learning curve for us. And personally, that was probably the hardest thing in terms of learning how that all

[00:19:02] worked really and how that kind of fit together. I think I'm getting better at it now, but for sure. You know, there was a time in the second or third, and I must say if we'd gotten through

[00:19:16] one year of publishing, we would have considered a triumph, you know, right? A symbolic triumph, but also in general a triumph for the people who are putting it together. But I think the third year, we were really in trouble. And I'd been introduced, I had met a

[00:19:30] neighbor, somebody who wasn't on or somebody living in the neighborhood who came up and talked to me who was a subscriber of the paper and he was like, I want to help you.

[00:19:37] And so we exchanged numbers and he texted me and he said, there's this guy you should talk to. So I contacted this guy and he said, all right, well meet me at Bar X. It wasn't actually called

[00:19:47] Bar X but this bar, like I think it was a Wellington Street or Temperance Street in the financial district. And so I met him and it was all, it was finance people. And again,

[00:19:57] that's an orbit that I usually even, I just don't pass through. You know, I'm a fucking rhythm guitar player in an alternative rock band. But I had five nights with him and my wife, Jen, who's our managing editor will tell you like I was crawling home.

[00:20:12] And I was like, Jen, I can do it. I can't do it. It's not worth the check. But one of the money folks met me at the Gladstone Hotel and we had a coffee, very civilized and he said,

[00:20:25] what do you need? And I said, I need $50,000 and he was like, 50,000 no problem. And I was like, damn it. Why did I say 100,000? But I'm supposed to write a number down and then they cross

[00:20:36] it out right away. Well in the movie, in the movie. So I was like, okay, I guess that's kind of how that works too. Like what did they get? Was it was it a will give you 50 and there's some

[00:20:49] ownership will give you the 50 back or we'll give you the 50 because this is just a really important thing. They gave us they gave me well, I got I was connected to this group because they were

[00:21:02] rheostatics fans a couple of them were and that was another kind of thing. Again, I talk about rhythm guitar legacy like people I think were able to trust us as a band because we worked

[00:21:13] really hard. We played three hour shows. We cut our own path. We were really individual in terms of who we were. And I think people just kind of applied that to the paper thinking that it's

[00:21:27] going to be a cool thing. It's going to be an important thing. It's going to be different. And I think they kind of just wanted to support the spirit of the project and there was no

[00:21:36] strings attached, which was so beautiful. In another instance, I had been contacted by a reader who wanted to help us. And we were looking for a storefront space at the time.

[00:21:49] This was like four years ago. And I wrote them a really, I mean, because I'm a writer too, I was able to write an eloquent poetic email to them about the importance of us kind of growing

[00:22:03] and the newspaper office being like the butcher shop, being like the postal station, being like the cafe, being like the record shop, kind of a place, a shining place on your neighborhood street where you wanted to be. And so I wrote this email to them and

[00:22:19] this donor got back to me and said there'll be $40,000 in your bank account tomorrow. So I didn't even ask for a number. And so there's instances like that and it can happen so many

[00:22:29] different ways. And so that's kind of been the really, that's been the really wild aspect of this has been people who just believe that supporting us is a good thing. And they know that we're going to, we're not going to betray the donation. We're going to,

[00:22:48] another thing too, a baseline, I think this gets lost often, but our baseline for us starting was we want to pay everybody fairly from the staff to the copy editor, to the illustrator, to the crossword maker, to the photographer, to the writer. And

[00:23:08] the reason we did was from personal experience because I was wrote for the National Post at a column in that paper for like three years and I was up in Yellowknife during my stay there

[00:23:18] and Tanya Tagak was doing her, she was performing in Yellowknife for the first time in 20 years I think. And I wrote them and I said, I'm here, do you want to,

[00:23:27] you know, a story about Tanya and they said, yes we do but just so you know, we're no longer paying for music stories. And I was like, holy crap. So when we started the paper, we were like,

[00:23:38] we're not going to be like that. And also a lot of digital publishing just, you know, at that time, things getting a little bit better, just didn't pay enough for the content and how our writers supposed to survive. So when someone donates, I'm like, that money

[00:23:50] is going to support the weird poet on your street and the playwright. And the, you know, we have a lot of musicians right for us as well and journalists, journalists who live in your neighborhoods. And the reason you live in these neighborhoods is artists are also in the

[00:24:04] neighborhood. So we have to, so that's largely an appeal. And I think in the case of those two donations and a few others, that's been the essence behind their support. In that description, you described, I think, these three interconnected pieces. And then

[00:24:21] you mentioned a fourth and the three interconnected pieces are there's fundraising, there's dollars that need to pay for this thing. There's content, you know, you're talking about the writers and the deadlines. And then you talked about the print quality in the paper. So

[00:24:32] the content's got to show up and look good and feel right. And that's going to be the thing that also helps with the fundraising. And those three are so interconnected. I mean, that's getting the product out the door and having a quality product. And then,

[00:24:44] you know, you mentioned paying people in the editor and you sort of mentioned some of these other roles. And I think that the fourth dimension of all of this is the team. There's

[00:24:53] a group of people that make all of this happen. Maybe talk a little bit about what does the team look like and maybe either individual characters or roles, how has that changed from 2017 to now?

[00:25:07] It's a pretty big time period. And I think that the business, the business of the West End Phoenix has changed a little bit as you've stood up events and you've got a space. And what

[00:25:16] does the team part of that look like? We're lucky that the team as it exists now, the core team has been with us for six years. Our photo director and our art director switched out during our

[00:25:32] second year. But that core team has been part of it for most of our life. Our last two hires were a Twitter slash X manager and Instagram manager. This was kind of a space like the nice thing about

[00:25:47] being in the beginning print analog entity, was it gave us a place to grow? And that was into the digital space. And so after five years, we decided we would okay, let's move into the

[00:26:01] digital platforms and figure out a way that would work. But we didn't want to do that too quickly. We wanted to be very deliberate about it. We needed to find people to run those

[00:26:10] platforms who understood what the paper was and could kind of create and craft a voice, a look, a style that just kind of hummed with what we had established with the paper. So our communications manager, formerly our X manager, our Instagram is shut down because

[00:26:27] of Meta has blocked all news organizations. So our Instagram person went over Twitter and our Twitter person, Nico Stratus ended up becoming our communications and our storefront venue manager. Nico is a incredible writer, incredible writer. Her first book comes out in the fall, How Dad Rock

[00:26:45] Made Me a Woman, which is going to be amazing. And Mike Gable, who's our Instagram now Twitter X person is a legendary figure in the West Andy host Hot Breath Karaoke. So the nice thing about

[00:26:57] having those two people on staff is they're also creative minded, right? And when we sit down and we talk about ideas for an issue, I mean, they have their eyes on the neighborhoods and they know what's happening in the veins of the city. They're younger than us.

[00:27:14] I don't like listen, I'm in my pajamas by 10 o'clock. So but they're out there doing their thing. So that's great to have. Jelani Morgan, when he became our photo director, he was the only black photo director in all of Canada. Now the globe actually has

[00:27:31] diversified their hiring, so he's not alone in that capacity anymore. But you know, Jelani has brought to us incredible photographers from all diversities and certainly people that I never would have met had I just kind of stayed in my lane or my lanes and not started this paper.

[00:27:51] We also too, I'm kind of getting off your question a little bit, but my question gets off my question. Good to know. We, you know, every five weeks or so, whenever we publish, we have 100 delivery volunteers show up and they come with their

[00:28:10] shopping bags and they, you know, we stuff their shopping bags full of their newspapers and they deliver them to their neighbors. And that I think is really the best part of the West End Phoenix are the relationships that have been forged with the delivery volunteers.

[00:28:23] You know, we didn't, that was the last piece to be put into place before the first issue was published. You know, everybody else was like, Dave, how's the newspaper going to get

[00:28:33] delivered? And I was like, don't worry. Like so we put, I said, don't worry. I just was, I was certain that this was going to be the easiest thing to figure out. So we just put

[00:28:43] calls out, you know, in social media, do you want to deliver the West End Phoenix and people immediately jump to it? And I, you know, they, people who deliver the paper realize,

[00:28:52] you know, it's a good walk. It's good exercise. You get to know like what's on your neighbor's front porches, right? Like what is, you get to, and not only that, you get to know your

[00:29:01] neighbors too, right? You get to know the people that are subscribing to the paper. And they're really, they're really, you know, people responded to that. And I got a note actually from a delivery volunteer this past issue that said like, on my route, when I

[00:29:14] walk up the steps, people are so excited to get the paper. Like, and so that was really, that's really, I haven't experienced that myself. But I think that's really beautiful. And somebody else told me, you know, the kids come to the window in their pajamas,

[00:29:28] knowing that the paper is going to be delivered this day, and they greet me at the door. So that sort of stuff is beautiful. So that was kind of a piece that came together organically, I suppose naturally. You know, there's a lot of magic around it. Also,

[00:29:42] we sweat blood, Neil too. Like I can't, you know, I don't want this to come across as too romantic an ocean because it's also fucking hard, right? There are moments when it's just like,

[00:29:51] what's, you know, what does next month look like? And it's been a really, it's been a tough year, 2024. I think that's true for everyone. Certainly true for the independent print media. You know, there were some people that corporate mostly, I suppose, but our subscriptions

[00:30:08] certainly aren't up there. Kind of they're kind of flat right across the pandemic in a way was played to our strengths because we were a home delivered newspaper when people couldn't go outside,

[00:30:19] we could like we could bring you the paper. And our subscriptions actually kind of grew during that time because people needed some stuff to read and and we were still making the paper remotely, but we're still making it and the printing press was rolling on. But it's,

[00:30:31] it's, you know, a lot of sleepless nights and grind in the truest sense of the word. But I found like when just as you seem to be, you know, looking over the cliff because there's been so much

[00:30:45] groundwork laid and because we're kind of a known entity and because the story is good, we find new champions at every turn, which is great. It sounds like there's probably a different level of confidence that, yeah, like we're

[00:31:01] up against the next wall, but we've been up against walls before and we know that we're going to be able to get through this one. Maybe not know how, but maybe a bit more level of confidence

[00:31:10] that you'll be able to get over whatever the bump is at that point in time. You mentioned venue manager and as we sort of kind of come to the end of the conversation, maybe we'll situate ourselves

[00:31:20] in the West End Phoenix of today because it's not just a paper. There's a other kind of tentacles to it. There's a space. I know you've got events, maybe talk about how things have evolved

[00:31:31] a little bit and maybe evolved outwards on the paper being the nucleus, but there's a bunch of stuff going on around it as well. Yeah. And again, like we kind of grew into that part of the paper

[00:31:44] and that element as well. We opened our storefront space at Three Bartlett Avenue last March. You know, like anybody sort of trying to put a stake in the ground, I looked at

[00:31:58] Jesus dozens of places in the city to try to set up shop finally found this place at Three Bartlett. It's perfect for us. It's a venue. You know, we have a show this Saturday and then actually

[00:32:09] I am playing there with Ryan Wayne next Thursday. Although I guess those dates are probably going to be never mind. Yeah, we do. We do. We do concerts there. We do a monthly fiction reading poetry reading. It's been we had, you know, five mayoral candidates during the last

[00:32:28] municipal election, whole staged town halls there. We had a seven hour telethon for Ontario Terrio Place for all to save Ontario Place and a lot of thinkers come through there and hold seminars and sessions about stuff that they're really good at. We last the last big event

[00:32:45] there was a series about disinformation where people talked about online news and fake news and how to identify it and how to move forward in this world, a kind of digital media literacy in a way that was over three days. We're actually launching over the summer an innovative

[00:33:01] housing design prize with the Matri Foundation to get people to think through transitional housing and what that looks like and you know, an open call for submissions. That's going to happen and yeah, it's a de facto community space really is what it is. And that's not self

[00:33:19] described but others have said that but again, a place where people can come and gather, be together and you know, that's like that's outside your front door. Like I remember we had former Blue Jays manager John Gibbons there. We've also had Leo Routens and Bruce Pudrow

[00:33:39] who was a former hockey player and former coach in the NHL, all West Enders. And Gibby, we sold tickets and people came and at one point somebody showed up and looked through the glass

[00:33:50] and then came in and sort of just said to the crowd, oh my god, John Gibbons is here. And I said, well come on in. We made room for him but my point is go out your front door,

[00:34:02] turn left, turn right, turn left and there's this place where something really cool is going to be happening. And that's how I want it to be. So people will know to go there,

[00:34:13] know to come to us to see something awesome. So yeah, so that was great to kind of establish that and you know, we continue to do interesting programming and it's also nice for editorial

[00:34:23] to have a place where we can all kind of be together as well and a good place to distribute the newspaper which is what we do every month. So that's nice to have a home right? And

[00:34:32] you know, we were distributing out of my garage during the pandemic and we were doing that in February and March when it was really cold and we just had our park is on our heaters in the

[00:34:41] garage and we just kind of kept it going. So it's nice to sort of feel like we're again, like we're deliberate and we're slow and you know, we want to make sure all the

[00:34:52] pieces fit at all the right time and also be conscious of the fact that we're not stretching ourselves so far that we snap as well. But I'm excited, you know, I'm really excited for

[00:35:04] this summer and I'm excited for next year because there's a lot of great ideas and we get a lot of great ideas from our readers, from our writers, from everybody, you know, with things that we

[00:35:15] can be associated with and stuff too. So I'm glad and glad and grateful to still be kind of energized and excited by this project because it is a little bit, it's different and a little bit unprecedented. And the metric, you know, the narrative metric of media is that

[00:35:31] it's dying and that it's dead and that it's going to get devoured really by the nature of the world and we just kind of say no. You know, we really feel that that's not the case. If you can figure

[00:35:42] out a way to do it just a little bit differently and if you can work hard at it every day, then it can have a life. So that's kind of how we feel.

[00:35:50] So you're excited about what's to come for listeners who've gotten to the end of the show and they're excited. Where can they find out more about West End Phoenix, become a subscriber, experience the content? We know they can pop by Three Bartlett Avenue but how else can they

[00:36:04] bind the paper? We're a subscription-based newspaper. We can't give it away for free. That's not a workable model. If you go to westendfenix.com, hit subscribe, $85 a year. We do seven or eight a year, including a calendar that we put out every January.

[00:36:22] This past year was Variety Store owners and you can subscribe to our newsletter there too and that's where a lot of the stuff gets farmed out. And of course Instagram, our kind of workable Instagram account is at webcentral and we just need to create an

[00:36:38] alternate Instagram stream because our other one was blocked but also at West End Phoenix on X Twitter, you can find us there. But yeah we live or die with our subscriptions really

[00:36:51] and there's always room for more people under the tent so we'd love to have you on the team. So please support and there's a field in the subscriptions where you can tell us how you found

[00:37:05] out about the paper. So right in this podcast and then everybody wins. Perfect. Amazing. Thanks Dave. I've really really really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate you taking the time today. Yeah, my pleasure is great.

[00:37:19] That wraps our second to last episode of the season. Our next show drops in two weeks and features a few familiar themes from past episodes. Our guest is the founder of a brand that was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the best new products of 2021.

[00:37:35] Her product is innovative and environmentally friendly and it's in the beauty category. I hope you'll join us next time for my conversation with Jamie Jenkins, co-founder and chief brand officer of Everest. The Innovation Day podcast is brought to you by Studio 245. It's hosted by Neil Follett

[00:37:53] and produced by me, Darrell Webster with Chess Originals. If you have any feedback, comments or an idea for a guest, you can reach us at neil at innovationday.ca.