Michael Campbell, business columnist at the two most prominent media properties in the province—The Vancouver Sun and CKNW radio—and, not incidentally, brother and sometime business policy advisor to BC Premier Gordon Campbell, reported that he was scratching his head earlier this week. What confused him were comments made by newly-elected US majority House leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat. She said her party’s energy and tax policy will be to roll back tax breaks for oil producing companies and gasoline refining companies. This confused Campbell because it seemed to him completely wrong-headed to not “build out” refining capacity in view “of the obvious demand out there” for more gasoline. And it seemed self-destructive to him that her policy would not, in his view, contribute to American goals for self-sufficiency in oil production, best brought about, he suggested, with tax incentives encouraging more domestic exploration and production.

It was as though Campbell had never heard of greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, or even the general term “environmental degradation” in all its various guises today. The “challenge in this market,” he went on, was to find quick and effective ways of meeting the growing demand for more fossil fuels. It did not seem to occur to him to even mention, if only to dismiss, the very real phenomenon of global warming, mostly brought about by unchecked growth in the burning of fossil fuels, in particular by North Americans—surely the more pressing “challenge in this market.”

It is stunning to see this lack of awareness of both reality and popular opinion in this, perhaps the most highly connected and influential media commentator in BC. The shocking ignorance underscores in this one example how the media and political figures both are so far behind the people, and are so out of touch with reality.

It was the premise of The Republic’s original launch exactly six years ago that political leaders were not being given the chance to lead because cues burbling up from the public were not being heard or effectively passed up to them by the major media—one of its two key jobs that has been almost completely forgotten. (The major media also fails nearly as completely at the only other important job it has, to inform the public of where the mind of the elites in business and politics are at, too.)

The reason elites need frequently updated information on where the minds of the public are on the day’s issues is because the people always lead the leaders. When it comes to global warming, for example, the people are clear: make new policies, whatever is necessary, to combat the burning of fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and try to deflect the arcing trajectory of global warming. Instead, at the local nexus of media and political leadership embodied in Michael Campbell, we find self-admitted sheer confusion and total obliviousness. One of our society’s critical systems is broken.

The solution, in The Republic’s formulation, is to reinvent media so that it more effectively gathers the voice of the people in order to more effectively inform elites in positions of leadership in business and politics on where they should be currently directing their policy-making energies. It was our diagnosis of the ills of current media that its ownership was too concentrated, its owners too rich and too associated with the elites themselves, and that its product was too far geared toward speaking the mind of power to the people, rather than finding a balance in also speaking the mind of the people to the elites. We theorized that if a new media could be invented that was produced outside of the corporate clutches of professional journalism schools, and away from the corporate culture of big money, ethically blind investment, and state power and largesse, it might find the genuine voice of the people with which to speak to power. And then, elites in power in business and politics might, in their inescapable requirement to only proceed with public support—that is, consent, manufactured or otherwise—could begin to at least speak about the issues important to the people, a necessary first step toward developing good policies.

The Republic was therefore designed to be small, in order to avoid exposure to the contagions that travel with big money, it was designed to be largely volunteer based, to avoid the corrosion of journalism by the professionalism churned out by journalism schools, and it was designed to be self-supporting, with advertising from mostly small independent businesses and subscription fees from actual readers, in order to maintain close contact with, and remain reflective of, the neighbourhood community in which this newspaper arose, the Commercial Drive district.

After six years, The Republic has achieved a steady, sustainable state: we have met our two-week deadline successfully 152 times in a row; we print 6,000 copies that are distributed to 70 locations, where about 90% of copies are picked up by readers; each issue currently makes a very modest profit and the business caries virtually no debt; its online version currently enjoys about 75,000 page views per month; and its credibility and authority among elites in business and political circles, as well as its authenticity among the public, is strong.

What would be better yet is if there were a lot more newspapers like The Republic, so we can collectively squeeze even further out of the market the corporate products, even while each new paper remains small and therefore manageable as an independent, sustainable, and authentic voice.

Toward that end, I began in the fall to offer a course at Britannia Community Centre to teach the mechanics of small press publishing. As a result of this course and in consultation with its participants, I have decided to launch in January, also at Britannia Community Centre, a workshop that will produce after ten weeks an actual living and breathing four-page print supplement to The Republic. Participants will be taken through the actual process of producing a newspaper, from conception through design, writing, editing, business-planning, revenue-raising, printing, and distribution.

Participants in the course will essentially form an editorial board for the supplement, and the supplement will be built intensively around a single issue. In the case of the first supplement, that issue will be Highway One expansion plans, a provincial policy The Republic wholeheartedly opposes on many grounds. In the future, other similarly-produced supplements will focus on other issues with the same intensity, so that over time, individuals and groups will accumulate who have had the unique experience of taking a desire to enter the fray on issues important to them, through to the production of an actual newspaper speaking their own voices, delivered into the hands of thousands of readers, and not a few business and political elites as well.

If the model The Republic has successfully created—a sustainably small, generally volunteer, non-professional, and locally-supported newspaper consciously acting as a two-way conduit between power and the people—can be replicated enough times by taking other interested people through the actual process, we might eventually re-invent a media environment that does what media is supposed to do in a democracy. And then maybe, just maybe, we might as a society more effectively develop solutions to problems, like greenhouse gas emissions, that threaten us so urgently—or at least see that business, opinion, and political leaders like the hapless Michael Campbell are to some degree aware of these problems, as a starting point.

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