Thank you very much for inviting me to participate here today. It's an honour to be here, and really nice to see all of your faces--so many that you see on the news and in the papers--right here in the flesh. Again, thank you for having me.
My name is Jeff Anders. I am the co-founder and CEO of The Mark News, which is an online publisher of news commentary and analysis written by accomplished Canadian thinkers and doers, people currently working in politics, business, science, and the arts, in Canada and all over the world.
The idea is to give a platform to the global community of Canadian experts and to give the Canadian public a form of public access to the people and the ideas who are on the front lines making the decisions that become news. So we don't hire journalists, we don't hire writers, we don't report facts. This is analysis written by people like you.
I'll give you a quick explanation of my background. I am originally from Montreal and have lived there most of my life. After completing a Bachelor of Commerce at McGill, I worked for five years in management consulting at Mercer Oliver Wyman. Immediately prior to launching The Mark a couple of years ago, I was completing an MBA at MIT and a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard, focused on the question of how the emerging knowledge economy in developing countries was changing business and how countries like Canada could adapt and stay competitive.
I worked in early-stage companies in both India and China and saw the transformation up close, where it was clear that what the thinkers on the subject were saying was true: Canada would need to innovate. Innovation is simply the development and promotion of new ideas.
The Mark, at its core, is an operation, in my mind, that harvests Canadian ideas and brings them to a global market. Here is what we do. We hand-pick Canadian experts and give them a platform where they can publish about whatever they want, whenever they want. They can write articles or sit for video and audio interviews with our editors. Ambitious contributors can even host their own video and audio shows for which they invite guests, conduct the interviews, and publish at themarknews.com.
For example, any one of you, being a leader in our government, could host your own weekly radio show or video show at The Mark News where you would invite guests and essentially communicate whatever message you're trying to communicate to the Canadian public.
The Mark's contributor base now exceeds 700 experts. In the political realm in the last few weeks, we've published articles from Rob Nicholson, Stockwell Day, Lawrence Cannon, Kim Campbell, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, Bob Rae, Alex Himelfarb, and dozens of others.
The community also includes a younger, global activist community of extraordinary people who are the new foreign policy actors. These are the influencers of the future, and we're very proud of them.
The Mark's mission is to foster conversation. Often that conversation starts with the most influential actors. Just before Parliament resumed, we asked political and other leaders to write about a single idea that government should pursue to restore Canadians' faith in government. A few weeks later we published a series of writings by Canadian leaders about their own political role models and the lessons today's leaders can draw from them. We are starting the conversation.
The core of our mission is to engage the Canadian public. A recent article at The Mark addressed the question of women in politics. One of the comments below the article asked, “Where is Martha Hall Findlay in this discussion?” A few hours later Martha Hall Findlay herself was there in the comments string, adding her views on the issue.
The platform can also be used quite formally. We are in early discussions with the federal ministry to explore the possibility of hosting a session at The Mark to engage the public in policy-making. In fact in advance of my appearance here today, I set up an area on The Mark's Facebook page to solicit suggestions for ideas I would communicate to you here today, an example of crowd-sourcing.
The big project we are currently working on is a plan to launch The Mark in French. I can't say too much about it at this point, but imagine a website on which French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians could engage with each other in real time in their langue maternelle. We want The Mark to be the bridge that facilitates large-scale discussion between the two communities.
It's important to note that The Mark is by design not ideologically aligned. We recruit contributors based on their professional credibility and their connection to Canada alone. We do not ask where they live, who they vote for, or what language they speak, and we certainly don't tell them what to say. The result is a variety of points of view on the issues that matter to Canadians worldwide.
The Mark is founded ultimately on the idea that there are thousands of Canadians--in fact millions of Canadians--working all over the world who have expertise about the countries in which they live and work and who are looking for a credible venue where they can share their knowledge with a national audience. The Mark is their platform.
The results of this experiment, which began a little less than a year ago when we secured private funding and launched the beta test site, have been overwhelmingly positive. The audience is growing at a dramatic pace. Web traffic was up 80% in March over what it was in February.
The contributor community is growing by dozens of new people every week. The Mark weekly radio show is now being aired on seven radio stations across the country. Today--in probably about a half an hour--will be the beginning of a partnership with Canada.com, which will publish articles written by The Mark's contributors, giving them further reach and impact.
While the initial vision for this was a news commentary website, we now see ourselves increasingly as a media company that produces original programming for web, print, radio, and television.
My comments from here--I have a few minutes left--will apply exclusively to for-profit entities and those that can one day be financially independent. They do not apply to cultural organizations or projects that have other value.
The Mark itself is a for-profit company. My co-founder, Ali Rahnema, and I believed that a sustainable business model was the most solid foundation on which to build The Mark.
Speaking as one member of a vibrant community of start-up companies across the country, the message from the ground is that it's tough out there. Funding for early-stage companies, especially for media and information companies, is scarce. Venture capital investment is at its lowest point in Canada in more than a decade.
Government funding, while abundant, seems frustratingly out of reach. The Mark, for example, has reviewed at least 70 different grant programs and qualifies for surprisingly few. If we were a not-for-profit organization, or if we needed to make large capital investments in equipment, or if we printed our content on paper, we could have access to a whole slew of grants and loans. But that is not what we are and it is not what we're doing.
There is an incongruity between Canada's objectives--i.e., the urgent investment in all things digital--and the incentives being laid out for innovators and entrepreneurs like The Mark. We don't need equipment. We need operating support, funds to keep us going while we experiment and fail on the way to finding sustainable models. We need support making digital work, not encouragement to look backwards toward paper. We need a shift from protection to encouragement, to propulsion.
The Canada media fund is extraordinarily good news. It will provide the resources that start-up media and cultural organizations need to launch the new projects that would otherwise have stayed on the shelf. We will see a material difference as a result.
That said, I have heard some people in the start-up community lament the sums allocated to supporting the broadcasters in their moves to online. It is already hard enough for small companies to compete with the broadcasters and the vast resources they have at their disposal. These entrepreneurs argue that this funding drives up all industry costs and diverts talent, making it even more difficult for the little guys to compete.
But I disagree. If Canada is to develop the kind of digital strategy we need, support will be required across the board. Innovation will happen in all organizations of all sizes. We need to collaborate. Online competition is global, and Canadian organizations are natural allies in that arena.
I want to thank the committee for its attention to this matter. It is of such critical importance, not only for the perpetuation of Canadian culture but also for the protection of Canadian prosperity in general. I would be happy to contribute to that effort in any way I can, and I look forward to working with all of you in that respect.
Thank you again for inviting me here today.