The Deep is a new home for in-depth, long-form journalism in Atlantic Canada. In partnership with The Coast weekly.
A creative partnership between Halifax’s The Coast weekly and two passionate independent journalists, The Deep is a new, dedicated online home for long-form journalism in Atlantic Canada. Starting in 2017, we’ll be publishing one story every month—ambitious, entertaining, important Atlantic stories that can stand toe-to-toe with the best magazine writing and reporting found anywhere.
Because in the hands of talented writers and editors, long-form storytelling enthralls, illuminates, and reveals new perspectives on where we live. And because in recent years, long-form journalism has experienced an online revitalization, and we want to make sure Atlantic Canada gets in on that resurgence.
So, what kind of stories are we talking about?
The kind of stories that can take you on a funny, moving, revealing ride-along with ex-cons helping other prison lifers navigate their first tentative steps into the world after decades of imprisonment.
That can take you on a harrowing journey to a country torn between modernity and superstition.
That can bring a reader closer to understanding the frightening reality of online stalking and harassment, and the deficiencies in the justice system that permit it to continue.
That can bring you, with the kind of depth you don’t find anywhere else, face-to-face with the most fascinating people and transformative ideas in the world, like the car manufacturer who wants to colonize Mars.
Atlantic Canada has some of the country’s best journalists and storytellers, and we want to make sure there’s ample opportunity for these stories to be told where we live.
We’re going to create a dedicated online home for established and emerging Atlantic writers to create this work.
After all, Texas has Texas Monthly. Toronto has Toronto Life. California has California Sunday. New York has The New York Times Magazine (and a half-dozen others). And online, startups like The Atavist are learning how to make deeply reported, beautifully written, rigorously edited narrative journalism work online. It can work here too.
The Deep is a partnership between Halifax’s The Coast magazine and writer/editors Chelsea Murray and Matthew Halliday, whose CVs as editors and writers include The Grid, Canadian Business, Quill & Quire, Toronto Life, the Toronto Star, This Magazine, The Walrus, and many more.
The Coast has always endeavoured to publish the sort journalism The Deep will specialize in. We’ve won the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Excellence in Journalism Award and been nominated for the Michener Award, two of the highest honours in Canadian journalism, for this kind of work.
But The Coast doesn’t have the capacity to do it as often as we’d like, or to do it beyond Halifax.The Deep, as a collaboration between The Coast and two passionate and experienced independent journalists, will provide the editorial resources to help cover our entire region, and tell stories that would otherwise be unheard, in a form that illuminates them as fully, compellingly, and, yes, deeply as possible.
And we hope you’ll help make it happen.
All the money we take in through Kickstarter will go straight to paying Atlantic Canadian writers, photographers, and illustrators to create our first six to eight stories, which will start to be published in March or April of 2017.
We plan to become self-sustaining thereafter, but to get this off the ground, we need your support to kick-start things.
Our crowdfunding campaign will bankroll six to eight months’ worth of stories, taking us from our expected April 2017 launch date to the end of that year.
After that, we’ll need to derive enough monthly revenue to make The Deep self-sustaining. That means building our subscriber base, holding regular ticketed events across Atlantic Canada (bringing the people and ideas presented in out stories directly to live audiences), and exploring additional revenue options.
Since The Deep is a collaboration between experienced editors, writers, and an independent magazine that has already thrived in a challenging media landscape for more than 20 years, we think there are few teams better prepared to meet this kind of challenge.
We’re not currently completing any past projects, nor does The Deep require any approval from any outside company, agency, or other group in order to distribute rewards or move forward.