As a journalist, I find our current digital and social media platforms are causing audiences to burn out. These systems thrive off of friction and emotional manipulation, making journalism just another part of the endless scroll of free online content. This has created an environment where the public is losing trust in journalism, while increasingly unwilling to spend money on it.

Talk Media is creating a series of events called “The Toronto Talks” which will bring journalists face-to-face with audiences to share researched, reported, and fact-checked stories about the GTA to its own residences. For our first performance, we collaborated with a wide range of specialists in theatre and events to bring our audience a live event that had us engaging with them in-person. This experience inspired me to start Talk Media, putting on these performances in the different regions of the city, ensuring accessibility to the city’s wide range of audiences and diversity in stories being told.