Welcome to Rapport

Helping to make the world more complicated

Hey there, buddy,

Welcome to Rapport. It’s been in the works for a while. It only took my complete disillusionment with academia and my urgent need to moonlight as an Uber Eats driver to light a fire under my arse, but here we are.

And who am I? You may know me from such Quillette pieces as, “Through the Looking Glass at Concordia University” or “The Deadly Boredom of ‘a Meaningless Life,’” “The Internet and Canadian Politics: Journey Into the Absurd,” in the Canadian Journal of Communication, “Bilingualism for me, but not for thee ‘Father Legault’ tells Quebec Youth,” in the National Post, or my latest piece on Canadian media’s reaction to MGTOW, “Farewell Fairness…Farewell Standards…Farewell Curiosity,” published yesterday on the Lost Boys substack that brought you here today. Or, perhaps you’ve found me for the first time and you need a quick and dirty explanation of what I’m about.

What drives me is a desire for knowledge production that is defined by fairness, curiosity, and a certain level of comfort with complexity. As someone who grew up outside of cities, and the first of my family to even finish high school, let alone university, I believe I have experiences and a perspective that are missing from most conversations. I was raised by grandparents. My mother was 16 when she had me, and my father, whose identity I only discovered recently, died of an opioid overdose when he was 31.

I have worked at Tim Hortons both as a Server and then as a Supervisor. I have been a Bartender and Server at a billiards hall. I have worked in various outsourced call centers for mobile phones and for CIBC often beginning as an agent and then moving into supervisory roles. In one, I temporarily relocated from Halifax to Petawawa for 3 months to help open a call center, ensure its systems were in place, and train supervisors who were already getting paid more than I was at the time. I have worked as an Account Manager for a technology company in an environment much like Glengarry Glen Ross, where the first prize was a Cadillac El Dorado, the second was a set of steak knives, and the third was you’re fired. I have worked at warehouses in picking and shipping. I have TA’d engineers for four years at Concordia University in Montreal and taught them as a Course Lecturer at McGill for one. Now, I am moonlighting as an Uber Eats driver while I finally launch this substack.

As for my academic training, I have a BA in Honours Sociology and graduated with Great Distinction (4.01 GPA). I published in the Canadian Journal of Communication while still in my undergrad. I completed the coursework required for an MA in Media Studies (Communication) but then switched over to Sociology to complete an MA there, all while being a mother and a mature student. Why didn’t I go on to pursue a PhD? I didn’t like what I saw happening in higher education, and I saw the same thing happening in journalism.

Rapport was dreamed up over two years ago.

You may remember me surveying some of you about how you felt about journalism and the media at the time. There seemed to be a consensus about many things. Here are some of the things that you said when I asked: “In your opinion, what’s missing in the news and online magazines you read today?”

Here’s what some of you had to say:

I think Rapport can aim for all these things. Except for maybe the Page 3 girls. Sorry, @Quaesitor12!

I think all of these things together point to a craving for writing that makes the world more complicated (in a good way). This is the goal of Rapport.

Free subscribers can expect weekly content from myself and other writers from across the country. Subscribers will have access to videos, a weekly Callin related to topics of interest, and interviews. The video commentary breakdown of the week’s topics every Friday will likely be satirical, given our times. The weekly Callin will be akin to CBC’s Cross Country Checkup, where I’ll introduce a topic of interest. It could be an article, policy, theory, social phenomenon, or whatever is important and needs to be discussed, and callers will weigh in.

If Rapport takes off, I’d like to recruit writers and eventually fall back into more of an editorial role where I send out a call for well-researched and well-investigated articles on important topics.

Can you imagine a single global substack featuring all the best journalists? And by best, I mean capable of doing all the things legacy media journalists have forgotten was important and more? It sounds like a dream right now, I know, and I’m new on the block. But I can tell you this - unless legacy media takes your advice and becomes more honest, curious, and fair, among other things, a substack like that will eventually come to level them all. And I would love it if it were Rapport.

Here are the guiding principles of Rapport:

rapport

noun

rap·​port ra-ˈpȯr  rə-

: a friendly, harmonious relationship especially: a relationship characterized by agreement, mutual understanding, or empathy that makes communication possible or easy

Mission: To deliver a quality and style of journalism and cultural analysis that returns to harder-to-find, tried-and-true journalistic ethics and introduces a set of philosophical standards. Our editorial goal is to respect point of view and voice, actively seeking out unheard perspectives. We will tell the stories others do not, and our emphasis will be on civil rapport, instead of snark and smarm, and on humility and charity, rather than arrogant certainty.  

Our journalism and cultural analysis will include, but also extend past, Canadian concerns to global issues, ideas, and the arts, with the aim of becoming a preferred outlet for commentary, analysis, and reviews. Instead of producing fast commentary, our goal is to go beyond looking at the superficial content of phenomena in order to extract what these phenomena say about society. 

Rapport is old-school. We believe that a journalism for the people requires autonomy from the state, corporations, and other institutions. Without this distance and autonomy from institutions and their interests, we believe that truth cannot be found because it is in the self-interest of all institutions to pick and choose which truths are permitted.

Thanks for listening.

Terry Newman