So I’m sure many of you have noticed that things have been fairly quiet from us at The Hatchet.
And there’s a good reason for that. Let me explain.
For those of you who don’t know our backstory, Jordan and I had worked together for six years making a show called COMMONS on the Canadaland network. We loved what we did and we were incredibly proud of our work. But, inevitably, there a came a point where we both felt that it was time to leave.
And so we didn’t futz about — we both gave our two-weeks notice, and then tried to figure out what came next. We decided that we should try to make something of our own from scratch and to launch a brand new outlet. And thus, The Hatchet was born.
And we knew that if we wanted to have even a chance at success, we had to have something up and running by the time the news of our departures became public, so that our audience knew where to find us.
Which gave us only a handful of weeks to not just scrape together a strategy for what this new outlet should be and handle all of the business-side logistics of it all, but also start putting together the first few episodes so that we could hit the ground running.
And then we launched.
We’ve basically been doing all of this by the seat-of-our-pants since. And I can safely say that this last year and a half has been a demonstration in just how far adrenaline can take you.
But at a certain point, it became clear that we needed to take a little bit of time and think strategically. And so that’s what we’ve been doing the last few weeks. And we’re really excited by what we came up.
The most important news is that this is going to mean a lot more Hatchet for our subscribers — weekly podcasts and newsletters, a number of entirely new shows, big projects, and so much more.
We’ll be rolling all of that out bit-by-bit over the next few weeks and months.
But for today, we’re excited to bring you this conversation between Nora Loreto and myself about the promise and peril of Avi Lewis, the new NDP leader.
We recorded this not long after the NDP convention and we dissect the challenges Avi will face as the party’s standard-bearer, including his relationships with labour, the provincial parties, his own party’s bureaucracy and much more.
It’s a really in-depth discussion and I think both Nora and I try to be as honest as we can in our assessments of the kind of candidate Avi presented himself as and the kind of leader we expect him to be.
