The Mark 2010

The Mark is an experiment in creating a sustainable online publication. The government can help it get there.

The Mark CEO Jeff Anders recently testified before the Committee on Canadian Heritage on Emerging and Digital Media. The following is what he told the committee about the state of digital media in Canada and where it needs to go.

Thank you very much for inviting me to participate. It is an honour for me to be here.

I will use these prepared remarks to explain what The Mark is, and to detail the conditions that made the creation and development of this home-grown start-up media company possible.

My name is Jeff Anders. I am the co-Founder and CEO of The Mark News.

The Mark was founded on the idea that there are thousands of Canadians working all over the world, a global Canadian community, who have expertise about the countries in which they live and work and are looking for a credible venue where they can share their knowledge with a national audience. The Mark is their platform.

The idea is to give the Canadian public access to the ideas and people who are on the front lines out there making the decisions that ultimately become news.

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 per cent in March over 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. We have begun a partnership with Canada.com, which will publish articles written by The Mark’s contributors, giving them further reach and impact. We are redesigning our website, hiring new people, expanding our multimedia studio, exploring partnerships, and are growing faster than we ever expected.

While the initial vision was for a news commentary website, we now see ourselves increasingly as a media company that produces original programming for web, print, radio, and TV.

The Mark 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: it's rough 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, 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.

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.

We don't need equipment, we need operating support, funds to keep us going while we experiment and fail on the way to sustainable models. We need support making digital work, not encouragement to look backward 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.

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 such 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 needs to happen in 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 Canadian prosperity in general.

Thank you again for inviting me here today.