Inside the Tech Takeover That Hollowed Out a Beloved Halifax Alt Weekly

With nothing more than grit, hard work, and determination, Christine Oreskovich and Kyle Shaw created and built the famed alt weekly The Coast. Started in 1993, by the turn of the millennium, The Coast was a 100-page weekly opus; it was Halifax’s go-to publication for arts and entertainment reporting and for an irreverent take on the news. Along the way, The Coast became the breeding ground for dozens of journalists, the starting point for their careers. Coast alumni include Matthieu Aikins, Lezlie Lowe, Paul McLeod, Craig Silverman, Mike Landry, cartoonist Michael de Adder, photographer Hannah Thomson, and so many more. Oh, and myself. But those glory days have receded. Facing the pressures felt across the news industry, and then losing both the print publication and the bulk of advertising revenue due to the pandemic shutdowns, in April 2022, Oreskovich and Shaw sold The Coast to an upstart online news chain called Overstory Media Group, or OMG. But even then, the pair stayed on as managers. “We believe Overstory understands the challenges of local media like no other and is committed to hyperlocal digital storytelling as much as we are,” Oreskovich and Shaw wrote in an article announcing the sale. “Our team isn’t going anywhere, and neither are we. We are continuing to run The Coast from Halifax but now we’ll be a part of a dynamic group interested in making sure even more Haligonians reach our stories and events.” Those high hopes, however, have been dashed. Oreskovich left the publication last year due to health issues (she is now doing well), and without a public announcement, Shaw quit in March. While The Coast never found its financial footing under OMG’s management, with Shaw’s oversight, the publication still put out sound reporting, sometimes excellent reporting. But now, with Shaw and two other reporters gone, the publication is completely rudderless, void of anything much of value, and includes AI-generated slop among its articles. Overstory was founded in May 2021 by Farhan Mohamed and Andrew Wilkinson. Mohamed started his career in publishing in 2012 at what was then a Vancouver-based blog called Vancity Buzz. In 2014, he took over as managing editor. “The young organization [Vancity Buzz] has had a lifetime’s worth of embarrassments in its seven-year run, from stolen articles and photos to unethical stories and errors, and has earned itself a bad reputation among Vancouver media,” reported Jimmy Thomson for Canadaland in October 2015. “The very mention of the publication—one of the few growing media enterprises in the city—elicits shudders and sneers of contempt from local journalists,” continued Thomson. “But Mohamed says it’s not the same Vancity Buzz that it was a few months ago. ‘We want to be better,’ he says. ‘We’re learning from every public misstep, but we’re doing so privately.’” Mohamed rebranded the publication as Daily Hive. “During my time with the company, we expanded the publication to five cities across Canada and two in the US,” Mohamed explains on his LinkedIn page. “I grew the editorial team to over twenty full-time staff across Canada, along with 100-plus contributors. Under my direction, the publication grew from 200,000 monthly unique visitors to over 6.5 million, and had some of the most engaging social channels in media in Canada.” That success was noted by Wilkinson. Wilkinson had founded the tech firm MetaLab in 2006 and, by 2014, had become a venture capitalist through his company Tiny. With Mohamed’s experience in publishing and Wilkinson’s money, the pair founded Overstory Media Group in 2021. They had ambitious plans. Starting with ten media outlets in British Columbia and Alberta, Overstory vowed to use $10 million to start fifty news outlets by 2023, employing 250 reporters. “We’re trying to show people that we’re serious, and quality journalism and community building actually takes time,” Mohamed told Evelyn Mateos at Editor & Publisher. “We’re not just here for the next two, three years. We’re here to build something that’s going be around for decades to come, and it doesn’t happen overnight.” Overstory’s big talk made a big splash in media circles at the time, but it never made sense to me. Wilkinson’s $10 million spread over fifty publications puts $200,000 into each, which is about half the current annual operating budget for the Halifax Examiner. It took the Examiner eleven years to reach this point, growing year after year, slowly building a crew of talented reporters who know their community, and incrementally establishing a reputation for that reporting. And Overstory’s stated goal of 250 reporters means five reporters at each of the fifty outlets. Salary costs alone would burn through the $200,000 investment in six to eight months. So not only would Overstory need to replicate the Halifax Examiner’s success in fifty different communities but it would need to do it practically instantaneously. How exactly was Overstory going to do this? What would be the revenue stream after the initial investment? The numbers just didn’t add up. This was not a serious business plan. My skepticism ultimately was warranted.

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“I’m proud of what we did up and through COVID,” Kyle Shaw told me in a phone interview. “It was pretty amazing. We had a good, well, nearly thirty-year run. Halifax dug it. . . . And then we were just too—you know, we knew business, but at heart, we were kind of romantic about it. And so when the time came, we should have cut our losses. But we hung on and we started racking up some serious debt on our business line of credit, and the house was paying for The Coast. COVID hit and we kept going as an electronic. We brought out a couple more one-off print issues, but really, March 2020 was the end of the paper—we started mourning it then. “And then we heard about this guy Farhan, who was talking a big talk about reinventing local media. He was going to have fifty outlets across the country—you’ve probably heard his spiel—and we knew we didn’t want him coming in and competing with us in Halifax. That was the prime reason we got in touch. He glommed right onto us.” The deal made sense for Oreskovich and Shaw. They got paid enough to cover their losses—they still have their house. And they still had jobs, while their legacy, The Coast, would carry on. “When I saw that OMG was buying The Coast, I thought wow—this is before obviously everything had gone to shit, and things seemed to be on the up and up—and I thought great, well, that’s awesome,” Thomson told me in a phone interview. Thomson is the same reporter who criticized Mohamed’s Vancity Buzz for Canadaland in 2015. In an odd twist of fate, Overstory later hired Thomson as editor for its Capital Daily newsletter in Victoria. He is now editor-in-chief at the National Observer. “I was so thrilled to finally meet Chris and Kyle, and I remember going for a walk with Christine, and she was worried, right?” continued Thomson. “Because she knows what tech bros tend to do when they get into journalism businesses. And I remember saying to her, basically, ‘I think that they’re acting in good faith. I don’t know that they have the right formula here. I don’t know that this is going to be like the slam dunk they think it’s going to be. But I do think that, you know, they’re trying. And I think they’ve got their hearts in the right place.’ . . . I no longer think that.” “He said the right things to us,” said Shaw of Mohamed. “He says the right thing to a lot of people.” Overstory bought The Coast in April 2022. In December 2022, Overstory laid off three reporters—two at Capital Daily and one, Kaija Jussinoja, at The Coast. Then, on January 30, 2023, the company fired four of the seven full-time reporters remaining at Capital Daily, including Thomson. Mohamed gave the not-plausible explanation that revenue forecasts were down (not plausible because, while the company as a whole was bleeding money, Capital Daily itself was making money). There are two better possible explanations for the firings. The first was that they were in retaliation for Thomson’s refusal to promote Wilkinson’s other businesses with Capital Daily editorial copy. Reported Ethan Cox for Ricochet: “A series of confrontations between Mohamed and managing editor Jimmy Thomson took place over the weeks leading up to the late January firings, in which the CEO gave orders to staff that they felt blurred the lines between advertising and editorial. Thomson and his team pushed back, citing ethical objections.” In one example, Mohamed sent a message directly to the newsletter team (bypassing the managing editor) one week before the firings, ordering them to “lead” Capital Daily’s newsletter the next day with the “huge news” that Tiny, a company co-owned by Wilkinson, was going public in a merger with WeCommerce. A plug for the boss’s company that Thomson rejected, once he got wind of it, describing it as an “obvious conflict.” One week later, he was fired, along with half the organizing committee working to create Overstory’s first employee union. The second possible explanation for the firings is that unionization drive. Of the four fired employees, three were members of the union organizing committee, which was then in discussions with the Communication Workers of America—CWA Canada—to unionize Overstory. According to Jeremy Appel, also reporting for Ricochet, the fired employees believe that when the organizing committee approached employees on Capital Daily’s sales team to sign union cards, the salespeople alerted Mohamed and Wilkinson to the union drive. The day after the firings, on January 31, 2023, CWA Canada filed an application for certification with the Canada Industrial Relations Board—CIRB. The union applied to represent all twenty-nine Overstory employees nationwide who weren’t salespeople or managers. The same day, according to internal company documents I’ve obtained, law firm Fasken LLP invoiced Overstory for $4,675.48. Fasken is, bluntly, a union-busting law firm. It explains on its website: We have packages that are appropriate for your particular circumstances: from a general or ongoing concern about union prevention through to an active union organizing drive—from small organizations to large and complex ones—and from a peaceful work environment to one where there are hostile relations between employer and union. We can provide a comprehensive analysis of your organization’s union risks, the key tools and training you need to be able to respond immediately when union organizing becomes active, and recommendations to help you fend off a union drive. Overstory objected to CWA Canada’s application to CIRB, saying that because the company was involved in producing local newsletters, there was no federal jurisdiction. According to the documents I’ve obtained, over the next two months, Fasken additionally billed Overstory for over $60,000 in services. CIRB moved slowly. It held video-conference hearings over four days in November and December 2023. Testifying for the company were co-founder and chief executive officer Farhan Mohamed and Nikki Gill, Overstory’s vice president of content. Testifying for the union were fired Capital Daily editor Jimmy Thomson and Martin Bauman. Bauman was previously working for Overstory at Capital Daily but, in October 2022, transferred to The Coast in Halifax for personal reasons unrelated to the company or the unionization drive. Reached by phone, Bauman politely declined to be interviewed for this article. But a person with knowledge of the situation at The Coast told me that after Bauman moved to Halifax, he continued his union work at The Coast (that source requested anonymity due to fear of professional consequences). CIRB didn’t issue its decision until June 6, 2024, some sixteen months after CWA Canada filed its application for union certification. The board decided for the company and against the union, concluding: “The Board finds that Overstory is a written news organization that operates a series of publications in three provinces. Its normal and habitual activities do not involve interprovincial communications and broadcasting. . . . The presumption of provincial jurisdiction has not been rebutted, and the Board does not have jurisdiction over Overstory’s labour relations.” In short, the board ruled that Overstory employees could not have a single nationwide union representing employees across the company, but the board took no position on whether or not employees in any one work place could unionize under provincial rules. Overstory workers in British Columbia and Alberta let the matter drop. But Bauman continued to attempt to organize a union at The Coast in Halifax. Even as Farhan Mohamed was organizing the anti-union objection before CIRB as Overstory co-founder and CEO, the other co-founder, Andrew Wilkinson, appeared to have started to sour on Mohamed. Company records I’ve obtained show that Overstory paid the head-hunting firm Inspire HR $46,200, resulting in the June 2023 hiring of Imran Rahaman for the new position of chief operating officer (COO). Here’s how Rahaman explained the job on his LinkedIn page: • Part of OMG’s leadership team providing operational guidance across each organization. Oversaw finance, sales, campaign operations, HR, and IT. • Seven direct reports across finance, sales, customer success, HR, and IT, as well as oversight across all staff, totalling forty-plus encompassing editorial. • Introduced deeper P&L analysis and more finance rigour for the monthly accounting schedule, such as reconciliations and monthly papers. • Developed detailed forecasting and revenue tracking for key publications. • Implemented e-commerce storefront tool to create a checkout experience for local advertisers and reduce high-touch service on small-ticket deals. That work strikes me as the responsibility of the CEO. That is, Rahaman was brought in to clean up Mohamed’s mess. “He is a great fundraiser, a great motivator,” said Shaw of Mohamed. “And was not great about learning, was not great about not being the smartest guy in the room, was not great about taking advice.” Shaw described Mohamed as “a micromanaging control freak with a giant ego.” “His character, his horrible management style, was clear,” said Shaw. “It was sad. It became obvious he was never going to be able to do fifty papers, fifty anythings across the country. He didn’t have the vision. Farhan could not, would not, make a budget.” Shaw described the Janus-faced management of Overstory. “I never met Andrew, never laid eyes on him,” said Shaw. “He never did a town hall with all the staff across the country. He’s a very hands-off manager. Farhan is the opposite, a micro-managing control freak, very hands-on.” By Shaw’s reckoning, Wilkinson’s investment into the company was just another of his startup gambles. “I can understand some billionaire with money to invest would say, okay, I’m going to commit $10 million to this Overstory thing, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t really matter. If his manager-slash-partner is gonna fail, eh, oh well.” Rahaman stayed in the COO position for just five months, leaving in October 2023. At about the same time, Glen Clark, the former New Democratic Party premier of British Columbia, was brought on to Overstory’s board of directors. As the business was failing, Wilkinson ignored the situation. “Finally, Andrew was convinced by somebody, I don’t know who, to get rid of Farhan,” said Shaw. “But that $10 million was gone, wasted—wasted!—with so little to show for it.” In March 2024, the Overstory board fired Mohamed as CEO, although he kept his position on the board. Clark took over as CEO. He receives no salary. The next month, April 2024, Shannon Havard was hired as COO, filling the position Rahaman had left vacant in October. Around the same time that Mohamed was fired as CEO of Overstory, Christine Oreskovich quit as manager of The Coast for health reasons. But the person with knowledge of the situation tells me that in addition to her health concerns, Oreskovich was frustrated because Overstory wasn’t sharing financial information with her, even financial information about The Coast, which she was managing. As someone who worked for her for seven years, I saw Oreskovich’s business management skills first-hand. I’ve never worked with a manager who is both hard-nosed financially and yet completely supportive of the often-messy process of reporting. Oreskovich got it. While other alt weeklies across North America were failing, under Oreskovich’s tutelage, The Coast made it work. It was Oreskovich who branched off into event management—the most spectacularly successful was Burger Week, which is now Burger Bash. It’s impossible to know, but I suspect that had the pandemic not changed everything, The Coast would now still be one of the very few alt weeklies publishing a weekly paper. So it’s odd that Overstory wouldn’t want Oreskovich involved in the financial side of the business. In any event, over the next year, under Shaw’s editorial leadership, The Coast carried on as best it could. Julie Lawrence wrote the daily newsletter; Martin Bauman covered food and entertainment full time; Matt Stickland was the part-time city hall reporter; and a number of other reporters came and went, their salaries covered by the Local Journalism Initiative. Judging by my social media feeds, there remained a loyal Coast readership. But then, in March 2025, Bauman was fired. “What OMG understands very well is that they’re in the business of attention,” the person with knowledge of the situation told me. “And they brought Farhan on because his Daily Hive newsletter was a slop aggregator, the attention getter. They had two priorities that work against each other—they wanted to get people’s attention with the slop stuff in the newsletter, but also make them stick around and have deeper engagement with reported articles and investigative articles. But you can’t really have both, right?” Bauman was the only full-time reporter on staff, and as he was focusing on food, he brought the most hits to The Coast website, where readers might find the more in-depth articles. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Bauman would be the first to be fired. Well, unless his efforts to unionize The Coast staff was a contributing factor. My understanding is that at least two other staffers had agreed to sign union cards when Bauman was fired. “One day, my boss and her boss sat me down and said they wanted to fire Martin Bauman,” Shaw told me. “And that was not a decision I could live with. So I left.” Shaw’s direct boss was vice president of content Nikki Gill, who had testified before CIRB on behalf of Overstory when it opposed CWA Canada’s unionization application. Gill’s boss is COO Shannon Havard. I asked Shaw if he thought Bauman was fired because of his union organizing. “My sense of talking to people in the office, people who knew more about it, is there definitely seem to be strong and plausible suspicions,” responded Shaw. After Shaw quit, so too did Matt Stickland. As well, the most recent Local Journalism Initiative contract expired at the end of March. That left just newsletter writer Julie Lawrence and the occasional freelancer at The Coast. Shaw told me that earlier this year, just before Bauman was fired and Shaw quit The Coast, he was on an Overstory committee that investigated the use of artificial intelligence. “Our committee found very little use case for it in our situation,” said Shaw. “Oh, maybe it’ll save you editing. You know, you just pop a story in AI and it’ll spit it out better. That idea, great. I spend a lot of time editing,” he laughed. I told Shaw that I suspect that since he left, Coast articles have been written by AI. “At the committee level, Andrew, you know, as a very involved tech person, was saying, ‘Hey, get with it here. AI is incredibly useful. You guys should start using it somehow,’” said Shaw. “So we were exploring, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all [if there were AI-written articles]. It would not surprise me.” Bauman was fired from The Coast on March 13. The day before, March 12, Andrew Wilkinson sent out his personal newsletter, which, among other things, discussed his fascination with ChatGPT and its ability to replace human workers. He wrote: Men: no offense, but you dress like shit. Seriously, most of you look like dopes. I’m not any better. For years, I’d wear the same uniform: hoodie, Patagonia jacket, and some dorky but comfortable shoes. After getting divorced, though, I knew I needed to get it together. I hired a “Personal Stylist” (actually not that expensive) and had her send me a whole bunch of outfits. And I started getting compliments daily! It felt amazing! Because after all: the outfit makes the man. We think we need to get ripped. But honestly, wearing a well-layered and colour-coordinated outfit and nice shoes is 90 percent of the battle. I loved having a personal stylist, but found it kind of annoying having to depend on someone else to not look like a schmoe. But then something crazy happened: I started just asking ChatGPT instead. Every day, I’d upload a photo of whatever pants I was wearing and say, “complete this outfit”. I was amazed by how good it was. And it got better over time, as I trained a custom GPT on my wardrobe. Suddenly, I didn’t need my personal stylist—I had an AI one. I found this appalling. A billionaire replacing an “actually not that expensive” personal stylist—presumably someone who will accept relatively low wages because they need the work—with AI because it is “annoying” to deal with a human is a telling value judgment. Wilkinson has no moral qualms about saving staffing costs by using AI—including, apparently, in the newsroom. On March 24, eleven days after Bauman was fired, Wilkinson appeared as a guest on Greg Isenberg’s The Startup Ideas podcast. Isenberg is the very definition of a tech entrepreneur. He has a history of getting involved, sometimes as owner, with tech startups that get purchased by giant tech companies. For example, Isenberg was a principal in Wall Street Survivors, a stock trade simulator that was bought out by educational software company Stock-Trak. Isenberg also was a founder of the video app 5by, which was acquired by StumbleUpon, which in turn was acquired by eBay. Isenberg’s Islands—“imagine Discord but for college campuses”—was purchased by WeWork, and Isenberg then became WeWork’s head of product strategy (WeWork had a terrible strategy and failed spectacularly). Nowadays, Greg Isenberg seems famous for being Greg Isenberg and uses his podcast to tell other people how to get rich, for which he undoubtedly gets richer himself. In any event, Wilkinson appeared on a podcast episode titled “If I wanted to build $1M+ AI startup in 2025, I’d do this.” In the podcast, Wilkinson discussed his use of Lindy, an app that creates AI agents. Wilkinson explained: I own like a local newsletter business and I was goofing around with Lindy. And I was able, in about an hour, to build a Lindy agent that could go through, it was basically go through—I chose a city, like a city near me. And I said every day I want you to—there’s three different agents. One sources all the news and it goes through like local Reddit, like forums, local news websites or whatever. And then another one that like takes it all and writes it and punches it up and makes it like fun and cool or whatever. And then the other one that formats it as a newsletter. And it is perfect. It is better than any local newsletter that I could write. And it’s more detailed because it goes to all these different sources and it even fact-checks itself. So I just think it’s going to become crazy. I mean, it’s going to, I think all of our inboxes are going to get overloaded with great content that’s written by AI. There’s a lot that’s problematic about this, but leaving that aside for the moment, Wilkinson was clearly envisioning Overstory’s newsletters being written by AI. As I was scrolling through The Coast website, I noticed that articles bylined “Team Coast” were often clunky, written in a voice that resembles AI. So I ran a few of them through some AI detector software. The most problematic was the May 21 Team Coast article about the Bluenose Marathon, headlined “Runners brave wet weather for 22nd annual Halifax marathon.” “We are highly confident this text was AI-generated,” returned GPTzero. “100 percent Probability AI-generated.” “Percentage of text that may be AI-generated—100 percent,” decided Copylinks AI detector. Other Team Coast–bylined articles from around the same period appear to have been at least partially written by AI. I requested an interview with Wilkinson in order to ask him about AI, but he passed me on to Overstory CEO Glen Clark. I had a half-hour phone interview with Clark, during which I asked him whether Overstory is using AI to generate articles. “In terms of generating articles, I personally think we’re away from that,” said Clark. “But what we’re using it for, or experimenting with it, is in sales, like sales lead generation. We use it for summarizing meetings, we’re trying to use it to automate the ad insertion process in our newsletters, and we’re using it for, and most, I think, journalists now are using it as their own copy editor type thing—you’re probably using it.” “Nope,” I responded. “Well, most people are using it for something, right?” Clark said. “Most people are.” I tried again, telling Clark I had run Team Coast articles through AI-detection software and the software had deemed the articles as either entirely or partly written by AI. Clark replied obliquely, in part because he didn’t want to discuss with a reporter the personal life of one of his employees. I respect that. But Coast newsletter writer Julie Lawrence has been public about the personal tragedy that took her away from her job for a few weeks (her husband died unexpectedly). In her absence, for a while, the only Overstory employee in Halifax was an intern. “There was a scramble to try to fill the position,” said Clark. “And so that was done collectively by everybody in the company. And that’s not the way you want to do a local newsletter, right? We’ve done the downsizing or the right-sizing, and then our main person [was absent], so we had to fill in behind it. We had someone in Mississauga, you know, writing pieces. We had people in Vancouver writing pieces, trying to help the intern write the article. So it was certainly not optimum.” Although he didn’t say it directly, I took that to mean Clark was acknowledging that in an unexpected moment of crisis, Overstory had used AI to generate articles for The Coast. That moment of crisis aside, will Overstory use AI to generate articles in the future? “I don’t know,” responded Clark. “I can’t speak for the future, but certainly I think AI will have a role in journalism, in helping to collect information. But our goal, my goal, is to have more journalists, not less journalists, writing more investigative pieces, and if we can, use AI for some of the drudgery stuff.” My understanding is that, financially, The Coast is currently doing OK-ish, slightly to one side or the other from breaking even. It has three main revenue sources—Burger Bash, the Oyster Festival, and the “Best of Halifax” franchise. Slightly to one side or the other from breaking even is fantastic in the news business. But it doesn’t leave much room for a return to investors. While The Coast might be doing OK-ish, Overstory as a whole strikes me as incredibly management-heavy. The company has perhaps two dozen people writing for its publications nationwide, but it has a CEO, a COO, a vice president of finance and operations, a vice president of content, and a vice president of strategy and operations. Additionally, Overstory spent over $60,000 on a union-busting law firm and over $40,000 to head-hunt an executive who stayed on the job for just five months. And those not-very-wise expenses come on top of a business plan that looks just plain silly. I told Clark I was skeptical of the entire enterprise, saying, as I wrote above, Wilkinson’s $10 million would last less than a year if Overstory had actually hired 250 reporters. “I’m pretty optimistic,” said Clark. “I stepped in about a year ago, and Andrew asked me because it was, you’re quite correct, the thing was bleeding hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And having said that, you know, from a startup point of view, we have over 300,000 subscribers, which is no small matter. So I want to give some credit to the previous regime.” Those 300,000 are not paying subscribers. Rather, they are people who have signed up to receive one of Overstory’s newsletters. “The challenge is trying to find, you’re quite correct, trying to find a business model that actually makes money,” said Clark. “We’re lucky that we have an owner like Andrew because he’s not particularly interested in making money. He’s more interested in not losing money, trying to get a sustainable business model in the current media environment.” “What we’re trying to figure out is a model that can be sustainable and can grow over time,” continued Clark. “And what I’m focused on mostly is the newsletter, because the newsletter is a different kind of digital product, right? It requires active engagement by consumers. It’s not an anonymous data point that you drive revenue through programmatic advertising, [like on] Facebook or Google which basically gives you clickbait. The newsletter model is a much more focused model, which I think should be more valuable to advertisers because it’s not subject to scamming or bots or even just American digital product. And it’s not anonymous. And we know that 40 percent of people are opening this newsletter every day, consciously and deliberately. And so you have an engaged audience by definition.” Clark admitted that Wilkinson is still pouring money into Overstory, but he’s optimistic that over time, the newsletters will bring in enough revenue that he can reinvest in the various websites and in investigative reporting. Clark said that Julie Lawrence has a “strong voice” of the sort that will bring people to subscribe to the newsletter. I have no critique of Lawrence, but this seems to contradict Wilkinson’s statement that AI can write “perfect” and “great” content that is “better than any local newsletter that I could write,” such that, at least in Wilkinson’s eyes, Lawrence’s job is superfluous. I think about Overstory and the possible use of AI to produce copy when I consider the overall media industry, and my own efforts to use the Halifax Examiner to produce quality news coverage and investigative reporting. There now exists in Canada a media ecosystem of government subsidies and supports, which include the payroll tax rebate, the Local Journalism Initiative, the digital subscription tax credit, and the Online News Act (which created the process by which media companies receive subsidies through Google). Nearly all news media in Canada reside within that ecosystem to some degree. The Halifax Examiner takes advantage of those supports. But I worry that within that ecosystem, there exists, or soon will exist, a phylum of media-like organisms that exist only because of government programs and supports. For instance, Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod recently told shareholders that the government subsidies are a “key pillar” in the company’s profitability. This comes as Postmedia continues to lay off reporters, close newspapers, and downgrade its editorial copy. And when the Online News Act (the “Google money”) was passed, Mohamed became involved in the negotiations about how to implement it, I’ve been told. “Farhan was part of a small contingent of people involved in those negotiations who was really pushing to drop the requirement for the number of employees at an organization to one in order to be eligible for the money,” said a person with knowledge of the negotiations. As initially designed, a qualifying news organization must have at least two reporters who do not have an ownership stake. Mohamed “wanted to be able to set up this network of, I mean, he already had set up his network of publications that are effectively one- or two-person shops,” the person continued. “So he wants to be able to say, you know, this is a media organization, even if it’s essentially one person with a ChatGPT and a newsletter list, and to be able to say this qualifies for the same amount of subsidy as a newsroom of ten people. . . . Their business model has always been fewer people doing more with less, right?” Mohamed was unsuccessful in that effort—the eligibility criterion remains two employees—but that he tried is indicative of Overstory’s aims. I can envision a near future in which a bunch more companies with news media–sounding names don’t do much in the way of true reporting but merely punch out enough AI-generated slop and news-adjacent content to qualify for the subsidies. As a result, I fear, soon “our inboxes are going to get overloaded with content that’s written by AI”; we’ll see our social media feeds bloated by even more terrible “content,” and in the end, the public will revolt against the subsidies—for good reason. Earlier this year, Postmedia received $4.2 million in Google money, Overstory received $141,881, and the Halifax Examiner received $35,976. Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod’s salary last year was $1.1 million (not including stock benefits); Overstory has five executives overseeing about two dozen writers; the Halifax Examiner pays me $70,000 a year, and unlike the others, I write articles. I couldn’t let this article get published without first contacting Craig Silverman. Silverman is one of the few people I would characterize as a “media expert.” He published the hilarious “Regret the Error” blog, started and ran Buzzfeed Canada’s news division, has written for ProPublica, and, to his chagrin, coined the phrase “fake news.” His career started at The Coast. “The Coast was the first place I got a professional byline,” Silverman said over the phone from Toronto. “It was the first place I got paid to do an article. It was the summer of 1996—I got to interview Sloan!” Silverman had not been aware that Oreskovich and Shaw had left The Coast and sees their departure as the end of an era. “So many alt weeklies are dead and gone in this country, and The Coast was one of the last ones standing, but actually still had ties and someone like Kyle who had been there from day one and has high standards and knows this city,” said Silverman. “That was a real badge of honour.” “It was a remarkable pairing, Kyle and Ori, I mean, such different, you know, skills. But they really came together to make that paper succeed for so long while others failed. Having The Coast without Kyle and Christine feels really, really strange. . . . It’s a really sad and a bad thing for Halifax.” This story was originally published by our friends at the Halifax Examiner as “The Erosion of The Coast: Founders of Halifax’s Storied Alt Weekly Have Quit, and the New Owner Is Publishing AI Slop.” It has been reprinted her with permission.The post Inside the Tech Takeover That Hollowed Out a Beloved Halifax Alt Weekly first appeared on The Walrus.