FROM JUNE/JULY 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

This May, a multi-generational group of print editors sat down to talk business, sharing insights about the ways that tangible objects like papers, zines and magazines power their communities

In June 2020, when the passing of George Floyd renewed calls to abolish the many oppressive systems built from scratch and designed to cause harm and ensure inequality, the media industry underwent its own reckoning. An essay by Pacinthe Mattar that appeared in The Walrus later that summer described objectivity as “a privilege afforded to white journalists.” With specific and knowing clarity, she wrote, “To be a journalist in any media organization or newsroom is to navigate the crush of the daily news cycle; the relentlessness of deadlines; and the pressure, care, and complexity it takes to craft a story well.” But “to be a racialized journalist is to navigate that role while also walking a tightrope: being a professional journalist and also bringing forward the stories that are perhaps not on the radar of the average newsroom but are close to home for many of us.”

Over the past year, Canadian media outlets have taken steps to pry open space through the creation of new positions and mentorship opportunities. Yet in the midst of a hostile media climate, supporting Black-led publications also needs to be a crucial part of that work.

What follows is a roundtable discussion with a multi-generational group of Black editors who run their own publications, devoted to the unmatched storytelling potential of print media. Nestled in is a vertical conversation on what goes on behind the scenes of a magazine, or a newspaper, or a zine. While readers have the distinct vantage of reading a polished final product, the question for makers – one that sheds light on what an equitable media environment looks like – is how to develop a sturdy team, how to intuitively scale operational capacity and what it takes to platform undertold stories. — Melissa Vincent

The following discussion took place on May 21, 2021 between Kelsey Adams, the co-founder and executive editor of ripe., Kazeem Kuteyi, the co-founder and creative director of New Currency, and Anthony Joseph, the publisher of The Caribbean Camera. It has been edited for length and clarity.

MELISSA VINCENT: I think a nice place to start would be to hear about your first introduction to publishing and storytelling.

ANTHONY JOSEPH, publisher, The Caribbean Camera: Getting into this newspaper publishing business was purely accidental. In the ’90s I bought an ad in The Camera for a band in Caribana. I didn’t know the guy [one of the paper’s owners] at the time, but shortly after, they ran into some financial problems and I went to bail them out, not as an investor but just as a friend. Afterwards, I realized that they didn’t have any marketing materials. They were just trying to do their best; very heavy on the editorial side but not on the business side.

It wasn’t until about 10 or 15 years after that I became a partner and tried to really get into the art of storytelling and making sure that the community got what it deserved. A key part of understanding The Caribbean Camera is understanding that the Caribbean has a lot of different communities to it – you can’t be one thing to one person. You have to be everything to everybody.

KAZEEM KUTEYI, co-founder and creative director of New Currency: With [our creative collective, also called] New Currency, we realized that there are people within creative culture behind the scenes that are actually doing really interesting work. I wanted to hear their voices. We wanted to take that further and actually create something – an annual magazine – that would act as an archive of thinking that was happening now within youth culture, whether it’s in Toronto or around the world.

KELSEY ADAMS, co-founder and executive editor of ripe.: We launched ripe. in 2018 and before that, I found that the food writing I was reading had a very superficial way of looking at food. I wanted to talk about food in a way that relates to culture on a much deeper level, like how we develop our cultural identities and family histories through food.

It was very DIY from the beginning: figuring things out as we went along and not really having a framework to work off, but just building something from nothing, which was really exciting and exhilarating. We’re really devoted to the stories of underrepresented people by underrepresented people. I’m really grateful for the feedback we’ve received from people who are reading the work and who it resonates with – they see themselves in the pages of the zine. We’re really not concerned with making a profit, as long as we’re not putting ourselves into debt trying to print and create it.

AJ: I think you guys are right on the money. With Kelsey, I like that she said she’s not concerned so much about making money. Although The Caribbean Camera has sold advertising, we’ve never really been that big on going after money. We’ve gone after stories, and the truth, and trying to see if we could keep the community informed.

KA: I think I’m also in a very privileged position where I have a staff writer position at an alternative weekly in the city, and use my disposable income to publish my side publication. I know that for a lot of people that’s not always the case.

AJ: Tell me about it. Like any other business, you’re really as good as the team is at all times. We had a really bad accountant once, and we woke up one morning and found we were $140,000 in debt and didn’t understand how we got there. You have to be very careful of that. The whole concept of a team is very, very, very important.

MV: I feel like that idea of bringing together a community is so fundamental to New Currency. What are some of the ways you went about building that, Kazeem?

KK: Over the years, we’ve cultivated a global network of people that actually care to see this thing grow naturally, and are down to help out in whatever way they can. To go back to this conversation about money for a second, when we were creating the magazine I already knew that we weren’t going to make crazy amounts of dollars off it. But it was more of a Trojan for more opportunities outside of the magazine, which I’m already starting to see the fruits of.

KA: I love that. That’s actually really inspiring to me because I really feel like we could kind of grow in the way that New Currency already has – like all these satellite contributors in different parts of the world. In terms of the core team, the five of us, we’re really all friends.

AJ: You guys must be pretty honest with each other, huh? If you can be honest with each other then you’re halfway there.

KA: At the beginning I would be afraid to mention when someone was doing something wrong, or if they were late, because you don’t want to jeopardize your friendship. But then I realized that we all should be working on the same level, so if someone’s slacking, you have to call them out.

KK: I work with my friends differently – that’s kind of like the same vibe that we have. We’re able to be very stern with each other.

MV: I feel like so much of that comes down to how you align around the same goal and storytelling ambition. Anthony, on our previous call you were talking about bridging gaps between communities, and I wonder, what are some of the gaps that you’re noticing?

AJ: Believe it or not, people at major newspapers are always looking for a lead. Over the years, for instance, we would be doing a story about somebody [organizing] against gun violence, and we’d continually [publish] something on him. The next thing you know, the CBC, CTV and The Globe and Mail are all quoting him.

On the one hand, I feel good about that because in the beginning, we were the ones who really brought him out and exposed him. But we have a situation where people get to the mainstream without us – or even with us sometimes – and quickly forget that we exist. I know they have day to day operations, but if they can pull the community along with them, then the community as a whole will be better off.

KA: This is interesting. It’s reminding me of the fact that someone from CBC told me that they read the things that I write for NOW, and then they take the stories. And I was like, ‘Yeah, and when you guys write about it you get like, thousands more views than we do because you’re CBC. Are you going to credit that and link back to that story?’

AJ: That’s a big part of our problem. It’s hard to deal with it, because you can’t go around telling people to do that, you know.

KA: Yeah, exactly.

AJ: You can’t tell them, but I wish they would realize it, somehow.

MV: I feel like that point about linking back to the origin is so crucial, because that’s when you really make it clear where things are formed and you allow a certain degree of authenticity that might not necessarily come through in a secondary generation of a story.

AJ: One of the problems that we face right now is [the perception] that newspapers are not as popular as they used to be. I’m doing about 15 per cent less in my print run. Prior to the pandemic I would get back about 2 per cent of the papers that I distributed. Now, if I get a quarter of 1 per cent, I’m getting back a lot – it’s like five papers. It’s totally crazy. But people still don’t believe that papers are being read.

MV: Kazeem and Kelsey, I’d love to hear from you both about your relationship with print journalism. What kind of storytelling is possible with a newspaper or magazine or zine – where you can hold something in your hands – that’s not necessarily possible in a digital format?

KA: I am in love with print and I probably will be till the day I die. Everyone’s been saying it for like 20 years – ‘print is dying’ – but like you said, there’s the tangibility of holding something, flipping through the pages, reading it, maybe even cutting out part of it, if it’s a newspaper, to save for later. Growing up, my grandmother would read stories in different newspapers and cut them out and give them to me because she knew I wanted to be a writer, so I have a real affinity for holding and keeping a collection of things.

AJ: I love that.

cont’d…

KA: There’s been a shift for younger readers where if you create a really niche publication, you will get subscribers or you will get devoted readers who go to you for exactly what you’re doing. Things like glossy general magazines, no one really wants to read them anymore, but then there’s something like New Currency that has a very clear perspective, that’s doing stories that aren’t really being done by any other publication currently.

KK: It’s quite interesting, because I think we actually got more traction [with print]. In such a digital world, we’ve done like five print runs. In such a small and niche community, people see themselves in it.

But the fact is that the magazine is also acting as the operating floor for people to get their work out there. I mean, the team and I are doing so much work to make sure it’s in the right places: in the right shops, or with the right art directors and creative directors in Toronto.

I was talking to a young creative this past week and she said, ‘Yeah, I want to do creative direction.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna challenge you. I’m gonna give you two pages in the magazine. I’ll help you, but you’ve got to do the work.’

In that process there’s this kind of mentorship thing going on, but at the end of it, the print magazine almost operates like a gallery or exhibition.

It’s easier to get into New Currency than it is to get into Dazed or I-D. I’m totally okay if we’re like junior college and that’s university.

MV: I feel like the need for community-led storytelling was so crucial following the events of last June, and the many kinds of reckonings. For everyone, did it feel like the ambition of the paper changed as a response?

KK: I feel a lot of that rhythm in the magazine. The fact that there’s no page numbers and no structure reflects the up and down nature of my mood [during the protests]. I wanted to reflect on the pages of the magazine where it’s like, ‘Today is good,’ ‘Today is not good.’ And that’s why it’s kind of all over the place. I thought, ‘We need to have a spot where all our stories can exist without answering to anybody.’

But I also wanted to make sure that it was not being commodified, as well. So when people would ask, ‘Hey, is this a Black magazine?’ I’d say, ‘This is not a Black magazine, I just happen to be a Black editor working on a magazine.’ I don’t want to be put in this box and commodify my Blackness and use it as a marketing tool.

AJ: That’s very interesting.

cont’d…

KA: I think the politics of ripe. are very embedded into all of the themes we choose and the submissions that we accept. We’re all left-leaning, almost socialist, environmentalist, anti-racist. So even if it’s not explicitly clear in the mission statement, or in the letter [from] the editor, I think it’s very clear in the content that we choose to print.

What’s really interesting about Issue 2 is that we are talking about class war; we’re talking about migrant workers; we’re talking about food [insecurity] and how it impacts Black people disproportionately. We’re talking about community gathering and community eating. We open Issue 2 with a manifesto inspired by the Communist Manifesto, but it’s about ethical consumption, and how we as people can become much more in control of our impact on the world and on the environment, and about the people who farm our food, and thinking more deeply about food beyond what’s just sitting on your plate.

I’m so proud of the work that all of our writers and artists and poets created, because it feels timeless and it feels so crucial for this current moment and probably will be for a while as we deal with the aftermath of the pandemic.

KK: That’s fire. It’s so interesting to talk about the aftermath of the pandemic. Even for us, for Issue 2 that’s being released next year, one of the themes I’m thinking about is that if world is open, who is left? Do the people thriving look like me?

KA: I mean look at the Weston family. You see families like that tripling their wealth, and then you see people being evicted from encampments in the same week. I have the same question: Are things just going to be even worse than before? I hope not, but I try to be optimistic.

MV: I think I’ve spent the last 13 months just thinking about how many new questions are actually just old questions, where the answers aren’t archived in a place that’s easily accessible, and how bridging some of those intergenerational gaps, and sharing some of that knowledge gives us a bit of a guideline for how we can approach the future, so it’s not like we need to start fresh, but it’s that we’re consistently building upon a foundation.

AJ: I think that George Floyd provoked an interest in the community because it forced the powers that be to look at what has happened over the years, and they realize that we have a problem. To address that, the federal government and even the provincial government, to some degree, are opening lot of opportunities for the Black community and the BIPOC communities going forward.

We, as people in the media, need to make sure that we harness it and work towards acquiring some of what the government has to offer. Some people may find that it might be best to build capacity within the community.

What do I mean by that – it’s getting people together who have like minds but who have different talents and skills and credentials, which is the most important thing, then building out new companies that could go after big projects [funded by the] government and make a better living for people within the community by employing them.

KK: Now that’s amazing. What you’re saying has me thinking a lot, because I think for a lot of these things, we don’t know they exist unless we actually go and search out for them.

AJ: I want to see this community wealthy, even at my own peril. Nothing gives me more joy than to see a young person be successful, or an old person from my community being successful. Then I’m the happiest man in town.

KA: I have conversations like this with my parents often. They’re in their mid-50s and they’re like, ‘The Black community in Toronto needs to come together and work together.’ My experience, as someone in my 20s, is that we are – in a way that maybe people my parents’ age weren’t when they were younger.

I feel like there’s so much collective championing of each other’s work. People act like that doesn’t happen in Toronto, but it does. I think there’s a narrative about Torontonians being selfish, maybe, or just not wanting to see other people succeed. But I really feel like we’re in a period of time when everyone is kind of networking horizontally so we’re all coming up together at the same time, which I love.

KK: Facts. Retweet.

cont’d…

MV: I am in love with this phrasing of networking horizontally because to me that sort of feels like you’re building in a way that is void of a hierarchy. I think that’s just such a beautiful standard to try to hold ourselves to, to try to hold everybody accountable to. Can you each talk a little bit about what inspired your contribution in [the June/July] issue of the West End Phoenix [see pages 10-12], and how it represents the ambition of your publication?

AJ: I chose three items and I’m going to see if it pops up the right way. The lead story is the cancellation of the festival known as Caribana because I love it, and I think it’s one of the best-kept secrets in Toronto. I don’t think enough Toronto people participate, but that’s another story. The second one is on the farm workers’ program, and a study that recently came out that I find very interesting. And the third one is on Hero. Hero is a movie that was filmed in Toronto, Trinidad, England and Africa by Frances-Anne Solomon, who was one of the best directors in town, and it just went on Prime.

KK: We actually went against the brief, a bit. We took some of the editorials in the magazine, took pretty photos or whatever, and deconstructed it. We tore it up and rescanned it with a caption: “Youth Culture is not an Aesthetic” to drive home the message that youth culture is more than a marketing tool. We wanted to drive home that message so we did a poster that doesn’t necessarily look as pretty as it does in the magazine.

KA: We believe that so many things can be looked at through the lens of food, from cultural identity to community building to trauma to issues of injustice and exploitation. We wanted to give a little snippet of the kind of work we print, and Jillian’s essay about migrant farm workers is a quintessential ripe. piece. It unpacks preconceived ideas about how our food gets on our plates and whose hands help it to get there. She dispels the myth of the white Canadian farmer that is prevalent in the different forms of media we consume and highlights the ancestral connection the original peoples of this land have to cultivation and harvesting.

MV: To tie things off, it would be really great to hear from everybody about the most remarkable memory you have as a storyteller, and how maybe that has contributed to the way that you each approach your respective publication.

KA: My favourite pieces were the ones where I got to talk to people older than me, people who had been working for a long time, and hearing the legacy of the work that they’ve done that’s been largely erased. I’m talking about female curators like Julie Crooks, whose work a lot of people working today are standing on. I think that’s another reason why I really wanted ripe. to be in print. The internet will probably last forever, but the fact that ripe. exists in a tangible way means that unless there’s a crazy fire or something, someone can find a copy of it and get a snapshot of the year 2020 while we lived through a pandemic.

AJ: You know what I mean – like, we are a newspaper, right? So we become history. We’ve done a lot of stories over the years, but when we just started in 1990 Trinidad had a coup. At the time, we were the only link between Trinidad and Tobago and Canada. So we had all these guys at CBC and CTV parked up at our little office waiting to get the latest news from Trinidad.

KK: There’s an image of [the Toronto DJ] Bambi that opens the magazine and it’s her in front of a billboard. I remember going through Instagram and I saw that image and I was like, ‘Yo, send that. Let’s put that in the magazine.’ Because it was an amazing moment for her and she’s done a lot of amazing things in the city. I think archiving these amazing moments that you only really see on Instagram is very important. It’s up to people like me or Kelsey to archive that properly, or there’s nobody else that will do that.

There was another situation where these two students interviewed a very prolific industrial designer. Now that industrial designer is mentoring one of them, and the fact that we were able to bring them together was very special for me. I think continuously positioning New Currency to create new opportunities for young creators is very important. I think that’s the power of creating tangible objects.