There was a time when Montreal's English-language press could staff a scrum. The city’s bellwether of the Montreal Gazette had a newsroom of 120 when The Rover’s founder Christopher Curtis started there in 2011, but by the time he left in 2020, it was 60. The thinning hasn't stopped since, nor is it likely to. The city's Anglo media ecosystem, once layered with dailies, weeklies, community papers, and broadcast desks, now runs on a skeleton crew that locally expresses a national collapse: more than 600 local news outlets have closed across Canada since 2008, and those still standing produce more with less, for audiences who long ago stopped seeing why they should pay.
It’s textbook: When local coverage disappears, voter turnout drops, corruption climbs, and a city loses the shared account of itself that makes it legible to its own residents. Montreal is the second-largest city in the country, yet the idea that its English-speaking population could become a news desert is more of a trendline than a hypothetical.
This climate is why one moment in last fall's municipal campaign stood out: during her bid for mayor of Montreal, Soraya Martinez Ferrada publicly likened The Rover to Rebel News. The comparison didn't survive contact with reality. The Rover submits to journalistic process, corrects its errors, and discloses its finances with hardware to prove the work holds up with a Canadian Association of Journalists award, a Judith Jasmin, a Medal of the National Assembly, and a growing list of nominations in a field dominated by CBC and its thousands of staff.
Natalia Rivero Gomez, a Colombian immigrant who freelances for The Rover, won a labour reporting award last year. Curtis calls it the proudest he's ever been.
"It's us, it's the team, it's this living thing that no longer needs me.”
Martinez Ferrada later had to apologize for the comparison, and power doesn't apologize to things that don't matter.
Into the doghouse
A heavy bag hangs in the middle of an NDG basement, musty from its cold foundation. It’s a lived in space: a pile of laundry in a corner, belongings stacked up under the stairs. This is where The Rover’s founder Christopher Curtis boxes between deadlines, a setup bookended by a pair of desks on one end and a podcasting set up on the other. On Thursdays, the basement is tidied, Curtis picks up managing editor Savannah Stewart at the metro in the morning, buys pastries for whoever's coming by, and the space turns into a TV studio for the week’s episode.
It’s an unlikely setting for a site of consequential journalism. The house in question doesn't belong to Curtis or Stewart, but rather a reader and supporter of The Rover who lets Curtis and his family live and work there for free. She believes in the mission to the point of an arrangement which speaks to how The Rover works: A reader-funded investigative outlet in the most literal sense the phrase has ever carried. In this case, readers fund the journalism by housing it.
When Curtis founded The Rover in 2020, launching in partnership with the indie outlet Ricochet, he was walking away from nearly a decade at the Montreal Gazette after watching the newsroom shrink by half around him. The story of that departure has since become a genre: the disillusioned reporter, the mission statement, the Substack, maybe a crowdfunding stunt. Curtis just wrote his chapter before most, back when a Gazette reporter with a fresh CAJ award quitting to ask readers for $12 a month was still strange enough to make the French papers. What's made The Rover outlast the genre lies in the people behind it.
Stewart wrote for The Rover as a freelancer in 2021, earning the site’s first byline that wasn't Curtis's. Her debut piece covered a rooming house in Pointe-Saint-Charles that was bought by a renovator looking to evict vulnerable tenants. She joined the team in 2023, ten hours a week at first, while juggling editing work at Cult MTL and La Converse. By the end of 2024, Curtis decided that the arrangement was absurd. "Savannah's too good to just work ten hours a week," he says. He offered her ownership, she dropped everything else, and papers were signed at the start of 2025.
"And that's when we took off," Curtis says. "I wish more people knew how much of The Rover is Savannah. I get to be the public facing guy all the time and I get my flowers all the time."
What Stewart brought, beyond the production discipline Curtis freely admits he lacked, was an editorial philosophy about what a two-person outlet can actually do. "It's very rare that we're going to break stories," she says. "It happens from time to time, but our benefit is not in providing the facts to people the fastest. So we lean into, ‘let's try and zoom out and look at the bigger picture, or zoom in.’" That approach pulled her toward documentary. Palestine on Campus, which she co-directed with videojournalist Justin Khan, earned two major award nominations, losing once to the CBC— roughly the fate of everything The Rover submits. Her next film will tackle renovictions, the reasoning for which doubles as The Rover's mission statement. "There's a lot of good reporting on renovictions that treats them as individual faits divers," she says. "I wanted to do something that really shows the structure in a much larger, more complete, comprehensive way."
To get an idea of The Rover’s state of play, their annual transparency report which offers a revealing look at its basement operations: around $150,000 a year, most of it small recurring donations, occasionally punctuated by someone showing up with $20,000. They dropped paywalled content entirely, and everything they publish is free. For Curtis and Stewart, the people who pay do so because they agree with the argument that local journalism is worth paying for, but these are the people who also steer The Rover.
Every new supporter is asked what they want more coverage on, and those responses, housing and solutions reporting among them, shape the editorial calendar. Out of that budget comes an accountant, a share of Khan's salary, and a war chest for freelancers. Curtis and Stewart pay themselves a living wage and cover the gap with side gigs, with Curtis editing a feminist erotica writer's manuscripts alongside contract work for Oxfam. This is the financial architecture behind an outlet that made the mayor of Montreal apologize.
They're clear-eyed, and a little rueful, about what their accumulated trophies are for. "It's funny, because we say we don't care, but we need some version of approval from the mainstream and the elite," Curtis says.
Stewart puts it more practically: "We recognize that we need something concrete that we can point to. So the awards are kind of that. Something concrete where we can say, no, look, we are journalists."
The big publications, Curtis notes, have what amounts to an awards-bait department, stories written with the submission categories already in mind. The Rover, meanwhile, has a basement and overflowing inbox of leads.
"We win by not dying."
The Rover’s claim to legitimacy holds up when it comes to the public. At a protest outside police station 39, Curtis watched people refuse legacy outlets, and wave his crew over instead. "This lady with the hijab was like, ‘I'm never talking to your news agency ever. These guys are cool,’" he recalls. "There's a real momentum that's starting to swing our way."
The work that’s earned nominations comes with risks no awards gala accounts for. When The Rover broke its investigation into illegal dumping, a story with mob and biker connections in its history, Curtis got a warning through contacts that his name was circulating. More recently, reporting on a shooting in Mohawk territory brought a phone call from a man telling him to keep his name out of The Rover's mouth, with a threat against his family.
Curtis was scared enough to consider involving the police, an uneasy prospect for an outlet whose founding mission includes covering police violence against Black Quebecers, and whose reporting from Montréal-Nord chronicled a community rising up against brutality and racial profiling. "The fact that we're small makes us more vulnerable," he says. "The fact that we're so transparent about everything makes us an easier target." Remember: No legal department, security budget, or institutional buffer at The Rover.
When asked why they do it anyway, the conversation turns to what the alternative did to them prior to becoming independent journalists. Curtis is blunt about it. "I have serious mental health problems and serious health problems that I have to deal with every day. But I would be in so much worse shape right now if I was at the Gazette. I'd still be drinking if I was at the Gazette." He doesn't pretend the current arrangement is painless either. "There are days where I'll just start crying because I'm so tired," he says, but the cause of his exhaustion has changed.
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