Five years ago, a small NPO appeared: the Fonds québécois en journalism international (FQJI). Its goal ? Fund the reporting expenses of local media journalists seeking to introduce you readers to elsewhere.
This is because the emergence of Web giants has had the effect of depriving our media of key advertising revenue. With income at half mast, it is sometimes difficult to pay journalists’ salaries. And even more difficult to pay reporting expenses, even those abroad, despite all the good will of our media whose means are limited. Result: the migration of advertising revenues to web giants diminishes our own view of the world.
Faced with this danger — and the risk of seeing a Quebec perspective on the world fade — we tried to find a remedy. Real, at our height. We have brought together under the same banner private, public and union donors who have committed to financing, without any right to review the content, the reporting expenses abroad of journalists working for Quebec media. These donors do not finance a media outlet, but the expenses of journalists working in different media outlets, based on the decisions of an independent jury.
Since its creation in September 2018, the Fonds québécois en journalism international has awarded more than $300,000 in scholarships to 65 journalists from 18 Quebec media who traveled to nearly fifty countries, to broadcast a total of more than 150 original reports. The FQJI also nurtures vocations, allowing emerging journalists to try their hand at international reporting and seasoned journalists to pursue their passion.
These reporters brought you with them into the wake of the ravages of the war in Ukraine; in the new daily life under the Taliban in Afghanistan; meeting Inuit women who had an IUD inserted by force in Greenland; in the camps where Canadian children whose parents supported Daesh are languishing; on the foreign paths of our mining enterprises; in the twists and turns of the salmon industry in Chile; and, more recently, among the crab fishermen of Alaska, whose challenges resonate all the way to our Gaspé Peninsula.
Several of these reports have won awards (Gémeaux, Judith-Jasmin, from the Canadian Association of Journalists), some have been taken up in major European media after being published in Quebec, while the FQJI has been granted in 2022 Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery Award.
All this to say what? That faced with the Web giants — who, in addition to capturing media revenues, refuse to pay them compensatory rights for the dissemination of information produced here — there are solutions. The Quebec International Journalism Fund does not claim to be THE solution, but one of these solutions. A reinforcement. A model from here. A unique model. An innovative model, which must be further consolidated, perpetuated and extended to ensure our right to also see the world through our own eyes.
This concerns not only the defense of the right to information, including international information, but, more profoundly, our collective development.