I come from a bit of a culture where failure is not defeat. Lots of things will be tried, and lots of things will fail, and that's okay. I think you need a bankruptcy act that is gentle on entrepreneurs who have tried to do something in this space. The American culture of entrepreneurship and failure is one we should draw on, because in order to find out whether something works, you have to make some mistakes. If I could start iPolitics all over again, I'm sure I could probably do it on less money and not make the same mistakes I made along the way, but they have been fantastic learning opportunities. Where possible, I have been mentoring and trying to help other people get started as well.
As I said at the beginning, I think that, as hard as we try, and as much as it might make our hearts weep, they are not going to survive. There is no indication anywhere in the world that big is beautiful in the media business. You need to get local. You need to create scarcity in your particular area, whether it's a geographical scarcity—your local rural paper—a demographic scarcity, or an expertise. There needs to be something that defines you as special so that people have to go to you.
When they have to go to you, they will actually pay for it. This is another problem, when you just throw stuff out there. The CBC gets money from the cable fund and from the government, so it goes, “Ha, we don't need subscriptions.” Well, how do we know whether it's even useful information? They just throw it out there. Then they swing around, and the big tail of the T. Rex wipes out everything that's standing behind it.