Why you won’t see IndigiNews among those sharing in the $100M Google news fund

On April 30, the collective responsible for doling out $100 million annually to newsrooms under the federal Online News Act announced the first group of publications that had received funds.

IndigiNews was absent from this list — and we won’t appear on subsequent lists of recipients, either. 

Though we applied, we were told by the fund’s gatekeepers — the Canadian Journalism Collective, or CJC — that we are ineligible for funding and membership in the collective.

The reason? We’ve learned the funding is for media owners, not newsrooms or journalists. 

Since January 2025, IndigiNews has been part of tâpwêwin media, a newly-established, Indigenous-led nonprofit. But the funding for IndigiNews’s journalism from the Online News Act funds will not follow the publication or its journalists. 

In an email, the executive director of the CJC informed us that we cannot “prove” that IndigiNews employed journalists in 2023, the year upon which this first cycle of funding is based. Because the next round of funding will be based on 2024 staff hours, we have been told we will also be excluded from that funding round as well. 

Instead, IndigiNews’s former parent company is eligible to receive those funds.

It’s hard for us to understand the rationale behind the CJC’s decision to exclude us on this basis. 

Though tâpwêwin media is a new business, IndigiNews is not. It was founded in 2020, and has never stopped publishing original, award-winning journalism or employing journalists. Anyone can look at the bylines on our website and see this for themselves. 

Furthermore, the CJC and the Online News Act itself both stress the importance of supporting Indigenous newsrooms specifically.

“Our overriding objective,” the CJC states on its website, “is to ensure that the Act and regulations are implemented in a way that supports the full diversity of Canadian media.”

So when we were first told we did not qualify for these funds, we assumed it was an oversight based on a technicality. 

After all, we believed that the fund was to support the production of journalism in “Canada” and ensure that independent outlets focused on underrepresented communities also had a chance to thrive. 

This has been underscored by statements from the CJC itself; after announcing the first round of funding recipients, executive director Sarah Spring said in a statement, “Today we show our world-leading model in action, ensuring Big Tech compensates news media for their journalism equitably and fairly across Canada’s news ecosystem.” 

But in a call with us on Monday, Spring said the purpose of the funds was to compensate owners of publications for lost advertising revenues due to the absence of a commercial agreement between media organizations and Google, beginning with their 2023 expenses. 

The current production of journalism — whether it’s created by newly independent media entities like ours, or by journalists laid off by massive corporations such as Postmedia — is not factored into these calculations. 

It’s worth noting that Discourse Community Publishing received $107,000 in this first round of funding, according to a recent public disclosure from the CJC. As seen in the publicly available list of applicants, among the publications that Discourse Community Publishing applied for was IndigiNews.

A statement the CJC provided to IndigiNews acknowledged this.

“The CJC-CCJ administers funding in accordance with our obligations under the Online News Act and our Agreement with Google, and we take our mandate to ensure maximum participation from Indigenous news organizations very seriously,” the statement said.

“Discourse, the news organization under which IndigiNews operated until 2024, received a contribution from the CJC-CCJ, as disclosed in our April 30 release.

“Should we believe the funds distributed are not being used for their intended purpose, we will look into it and ensure recipients comply with their funding agreement.”

In their own statement, Discourse Community Publishing said they “advocated for fair funding formulas and equitable rules” during the creation of the CJC “that prioritized independent media across Canada,” including Indigenous media. 

“As current members of the CJC, we continue to support efforts that contribute to the CJC advancing these goals,” they added. 

Our separation from Discourse Community Publishing was an act of Indigenous sovereignty. The newsroom leaders of IndigiNews never felt right about the fact that our publication — which was created to amplify the stories of Indigenous people — was led by non-Indigenous people. 

So, in January, we changed that.

Our new parent company, tâpwêwin media, was founded by — and is entirely governed by — Indigenous women.

This model is based on our own cultural teachings around leadership, caretaking, self-determination and truth-telling. 

This is also a right guaranteed under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which underlines the right of Indigenous people to “maintain, control, protect and develop” our own literatures and intellectual property. 

The journalism at IndigiNews has always centred those values, and throughout our transition, IndigiNews never stopped publishing original journalism that uplifts Indigenous communities and storytellers. 

It is in this spirit that we are being transparent with our readers about this situation, since it will inevitably affect us — pushing us behind the other media outlets, which received anywhere from thousands to millions of dollars to continue their operations. It makes things less equitable for our small team. 

We are disappointed that a model such as the CJC — brand-new, and founded on commitments to fairness, inclusivity and a robust future for “Canadian” media — has already demonstrated that it is not capable of fulfilling these ambitions. 

It’s not lost on us that other companies, large and small, may also be profiting off the work of reporters and editors who they no longer employ. Postmedia, which received more than $4.2 million, has already laid off dozens of its staff since 2023. 

We fail to see how this process supports a fair, equitable and diverse future for the journalism industry — or how it ensures the communities and audiences we serve see their stories  represented in the country’s media. 

This disappointment has only strengthened our commitment to building a storytelling ecosystem that is founded on Indigenous values and principles, to honour and celebrate our people and our stories. 

We created tâpwêwin media because we believe in that future, and we put our faith in readers and Indigenous community members — not industry gatekeepers or Big Tech — to help us build it.