I am The Bulldog

A note on election planning here at PW HQ

A treasured souvenir.

I was trained to throw everything I have at a big story.

The Montreal Gazette used to have a kind of mental switch, often activated by Mel Morris when he was Managing Editor, that elevated a story from “business as usual” to “all hands on deck.” If you were on the paper’s payroll and you could walk, out the door you went. Terrible mass shootings at the École Polytechnique, Dawson College and Concordia University between 1989 and 1996 got the treatment. [UPDATE: I’m reminded that Dawson was in 2006. I remember now watching from afar and envying my former colleagues at the Gaz, in a reflex that non-journalists will probably find macabre, because it is. I don’t know what the heck I thought I remembered last night when I wrote this.] So did a few political stories, especially the Quebec secession referendum in 1995.

One time a bunch of us were just hanging out at the newsroom on a pleasant summer Sunday. I was probably there to finish writing a freelance jazz piece. The only one of us who was actually working a shift got word that a business was on fire near St. Laurent Blvd. “Let’s blanket it!” somebody said, and five of us went to report the fire just for kicks. Interview witnesses, interview cops, interview firefighters. It was arson. The owner might have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for us pesky kids.

The National Post and, later, Maclean’s had similar instincts, with varying levels of available resources. I remember an impromptu Post breakfast in Ottawa after Pierre Trudeau died, with Roy MacGregor, Christie Blatchford, Rebecca Eckler and me, all ready to chronicle the legend’s last trip home to Montreal. There’s room for introspection about how we covered the world after 9/11, but we didn’t cover it timidly.

I like teams. I briefly left Maclean’s for the Toronto Star, a wonderful organization but a bad fit for me as it turned out, in part because the Star had more bodies and I hoped I would work on more teams. It turns out Maclean’s had a stronger team instinct despite its thinner roster, until near the end of its useful existence.

In 2015 Alison Uncles was the magazine’s managing editor. She cooked up a mad scheme to produce a daily digital edition of Maclean’s, then still a weekly magazine with a robust online presence, to bring readers all the election news. She called it The Bulldog, after an old slang term for a daily paper’s early edition. We grumbled about the workload, then set to work.

When it was over, we got coffee cups.

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These things have been on my mind. On Sunday the Liberal Party of Canada will announce the name of its new leader. I don’t want to spoil the suspense, but Mark Carney isn’t a Member of Parliament. He has no interest in “meeting the House” because the guards won’t let him onto the Commons floor. He will probably meet the Governor General instead. We are perhaps a couple of weeks from the beginning of a federal election campaign. Maybe less.

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It is going well here at the Paul Wells newsletter. In the month after Chrystia Freeland quit as finance minister, I sold as many paid subscriptions as in the 10 months before she resigned. (Hiking my prices flattened that line right back out, but paid subscriptions are still growing at a gentle pace.) After Donald Trump’s inauguration, downloads of my podcast, from the Substack platform alone, accelerated tenfold from their rate a year earlier. That pace has calmed only in the last several days.

In response to this news hurricane, I’ve tried to make myself useful. Since Freeland’s resignation I’ve published 34 posts, a 54% increase from the same period a year earlier. They include this piece on Pierre Poilievre and this one on Trump, two of the most widely-read and well-received since this newsletter launched. This comforts me in the hope that I’ve delivered quality as well as volume. I’ve accomplished that, in part, by hiring an executive producer to help me with logistics and planning.

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I spent the last few weeks considering an ambitious expansion. With, say, three more reporters and another editor/planner/instigator type, I could push out substantially more content, have files from different parts of the country, really make some stuff happen. I put a post on LinkedIn seeking expressions of interest from journalists who could use more work. Some excellent candidates reached out. If I capped the whole enterprise at seven weeks, starting more or less this coming Monday and ending with the production of a big post-vote narrative, I could maybe afford it. Easier if I had sponsors or advertisers. I thought it would be fun to call it The Bulldog.

I’ve decided not to proceed. Money’s part of it. Sponsors and advertisers didn’t put their hands up. Who can blame them? Tariffs are coming. I could work harder to find sponsors, but that’s not my strength. I could squeeze all of you harder. There are techniques that work. “We’ve got them on the RUN, we’re exposing their LIES, they’re starting to PANIC, press the Subscribe button to keep the heat on!” There’s already a higher subscription tier for superfans; I could urge more of you to bump from “paying” to “paying more.” But at some point I’d risk leaving the impression that you’re not doing enough, and that’s the opposite of what I think. You’re already more generous than I could ever have expected.

Besides, the bigger problem is that what I do doesn’t scale well. What would three reporters do? Well, at Maclean’s we kept a running tally of every party’s campaign promises, straight summary with no interpretation, that was unbelievably popular. That hunger for basic information should give everyone in my line of work pause. Somebody could do that, plus some other stuff. Others could go to campaign events, describe what they saw. Regional issues. I’ll be surprised if any party runs a traditional leader tour in this election, so it’ll be catch-as-catch-can. I could do more videos. I still hope to work more closely with a pollster. We’ll see.

I’m just not sure a lot of you read me looking for a better Hill briefing. If anyone is, you’re missing out on the Politico Playbook.

There are strong analytical and interpretive voices I’d like to hear more from, essayists and poets more than quote-collectors, but to be honest, that list isn’t long. And the strength of that list is that none of the people on it sound like me. I worry that even if I could get the best writers, some people here would bean-count how many of them preferred the correct party, rather than reading them for insight. That’s a hassle I’d rather skip.

Above all, I’m nervous about what I call “bankrupt Jamie Oliver.” The British chef had a cooking show, then a restaurant, then 100 restaurants, then he had to close most of them. He told an interviewer once (I paraphrase from memory) that the first restaurant was in the best place in England for Jamie Oliver food. The second restaurant was in the second-best place. After 40 or so, he was opening restaurants in places that were objectively the wrong places for Jamie Oliver food.

In the end I reminded myself that the name at the top of the newsletter is Paul Wells. My product is… whatever Paul Wells does. If I raise more money to provide you with other stuff, at some point I just dilute the product. I’ll push and test the precise location of that point. I always hope to showcase more guests and freelancers. I would like to send good reporters to stories I can’t get to, but probably only occasionally. I plan to do more live events. I like The Panel, and what’s more important is that so many of you do too.

But mostly my plan for the election is to tell you what I think and feel about what I see and hear. Craft, not industry. I’ll give you as much as I can, short of burnout. I’ll make it as good as I can. I could have just gone ahead and done that, without sharing these thoughts. But I figured I was due to give you an update. You’re my team.