In a discussion at Web Summit Vancouver 2025, Indiegraf’s CEO and co-founder, Erin Millar, joined Megan Stewart, Executive Producer of News and Digital Video at CBC, to tackle the challenge of restoring public trust in media.
The panel focused on how news entrepreneurs and independent outlets can employ innovative methods to cultivate audience trust, keep pace with changing consumption patterns, and safeguard the future of independent journalism.
Watch the full panel 👇
Here are a few highlights from this discussion.
Q: What did you learn from launching The Discourse about an appetite from audiences for local information and news?
Erin: A lot of the local newspapers that we’re seeing declining have been reporting every single thing, covering every incident that happens, every meeting… and it’s really difficult to do everything.
So what we did was we created a model that was really about community engagement and inviting our audience to help us focus. Of course, we still shared a lot of information about what’s happening in the community but in terms of dedicating [resources to] investigative reporting and other higher-cost types of journalism, we just couldn’t do it all.
Our insight [at The Discourse] was that there is demand for that work if we are prioritizing the issues that are most important to the communities. When we do that and we show up day after day doing that work, then people are willing to pay for that. That’s how we built a business model to incentivize that direct community-engaged work.
Q: Can you talk a little bit more about that revenue stream, and give some examples of how media outlets or media entrepreneurs would start and how they would fund their operations?
Erin: I’ll use an example of an entrepreneur that I really admire. The Palm Spring’s Post Mark Talkington worked in journalism for years for MSN.com, and he worked at Microsoft. He wanted to create a product that was supporting his own community in Palm Springs. He just started doing a daily newsletter [about what] was happening in the community and it took off.
He got to a few hundred subscribers and then his first monetization strategy was launching a buy me a coffee campaign where it’s like pitch in a buck or two bucks if you value this. People were so enthusiastic that he thought, “Oh, there’s actually a business model in this.” He came to Indiegraf at that point and we helped him.
Our technology is a one-stop shop to set up a full multi-revenue stream, multi-format news business and really build that out into a sustainable small business beyond just a Substack newsletter. Now, just three years in, he reaches half of the households in Palm Springs and makes about $250,000 a year doing that.
Q: In terms of launching or expanding for media entrepreneurs, what are they looking for from Indiegraf? And what are they looking for in general right now to succeed?
Erin: The biggest barrier that we really see is in getting that first little bit of seed capital to get off the ground.
What Indiegraf is focused on is making it as easy as possible. We can’t solve all of the money problems, but what we can solve is making the best tools available in the market for a cost that’s really accessible. Our tool itself is cheaper than if you had to put all the different point solutions together and try to integrate them.
We also know that you need more than just content to get started. You need to be able to have some back office support, whether that’s marketing or building out an advertising and sales strategy.
Indiegraf Experts is the services marketplace where you can hire fractional services if you’re not yet ready to hire a full-time person. The goal is to make it as cheap and easy as possible to have journalists own their own platforms and to be able to focus on the highest use of their time, which is often producing great content and engaging with their community.
Q: How does that help with public trust when a news outlet is so close to the community it’s representing and reporting on?
Erin: We’re obviously in a moment of crisis and trust in all institutions, but especially in the media. We’ve seen how that’s unfolded in Canada and the U.S., especially over the last while… A lot of people are skeptical of big media institutions, but they trust people.
Whether it’s Joe Rogan or a local information influencer like Mark Talkington that you can connect with, they trust people who are authentic and owning what they care about. We’re leveraging that shift from larger corporate media to independent media, and localizing that.
Local media is closely tied to polarization. When you don’t have access to a local source of quality information, you’re less likely to vote, to volunteer, or even trust your neighbors. But when you do have access to that, it helps connect you with your neighbors around issues that really matter and builds common understanding.
From an impact perspective, what motivates me and my co-founder Caitlin Havlak, the most is how we can start rebuilding that trust from the community level. We feel that equipping a network of independently owned and governed news entrepreneurs and information influencers with the tools of journalism is a really powerful way to do that.
Q: 40 percent of people, according to Reuters Institute, trust public news. That means 60 percent of people don’t. What are your thoughts on how we got here?
Erin: I’m a journalist who very much came up through the traditional system and was trained in the traditional approaches. I do think that we made some pretty critical mistakes. One of them was pretending that objectivity was an ideal that could be realized rather than a tool and pretending that we didn’t have any perspective. We do, we’re humans.
Secondly, I think a lot of it comes back to the advertising economy and the fact that the core business model that has driven our industry was not actually selling a valuable news product to audiences. It was grabbing audiences’ attention and selling their attention to advertisers.
One of the things that I love about the news entrepreneurs that are working on Indiegraf’s platform is that they think about the content and the journalism that they’re producing as a product. They think first and foremost about how to create something that is valuable enough that people will pay for it.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges these media entrepreneurs are facing right now?
Erin: 85 percent of our publishers are in the U.S., and we work with a lot of Spanish-language publications in the south that are serving immigrant markets. We’re seeing a lot of new attacks on the media since Trump’s inauguration.
Maritza L. Félix is the founder of Conecta Arizona, an independent nonprofit news organization dedicated to informing and empowering the Hispanic, migrant, and border communities in Arizona and beyond. Félix and her team work at the intersection of journalism, community service, and advocacy.
We all know that when we’ve seen authoritarian governments come into power, one of the first things that happens is that the independent media gets attacked. There’s always been nuisance lawsuits that have happened for journalists, whether that’s being claimed for defamation.
But now we’re seeing this confluence of legal attacks on journalists that relate to both defamation and libel, and their immigration status. Also, we’re seeing more and more bot attacks, digital and personal security issues that are happening.
What I’ve found amazing is that despite the fact that these news entrepreneurs — who are literally rebuilding democracy within their own communities — are taking financial, physical and digital security risks… They want to be on the front lines fighting for their communities and ensuring that they have access to reliable information.
This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
