Since The Tyee is showing you theirs, I'll show mine.
We've been running iPolitics for almost six years now. We employ 23 people full time, and our entire operation has been funded with just over $3 million. We travel, at times, to the major conventions. We try to be as much of a presence as we can. We're nimble, and we employ a lot of young people.
My feeling is not that the digital tax credit did this. It rewarded those who invested. It wasn't just free money. It matched you. If you could convince someone to give you $1 million, and you spent x percentage of that on development and on journalism, they would refund you a portion of that. That was very helpful, and it allowed you to reach scale.
I think creating innovation funds that don't require the hard work of first coming up with an idea, and proving the viability of that idea, is mostly going to end in heartbreak.
That said, I think when David Beers started up The Tyee, he bootstrapped it amazingly well and found a lot of very interesting voices, and has developed some quite good journalism along the way.