It's a funny thing about alternative newsmedia organizations like The Coast. More than 100 of us across the US and Canada have banded together as members of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and we have great meetings where people who do the specialized work of producing an urban weekly newspaper discover their peers. But because the journalism we tend to do is intently focused on our own local communities, we don't work together very much. A feature story about Halifax won't mean a lot to readers of Creative Loafing Atlanta.
The exceptions to this rule are exciting to me because they add an extra dimension—a strength in our union—to independent journalism. So I'm thrilled The Coast is sharing one such exception with you this week. Our cover story, "How your paycheque supports fracking," got its start at the Boulder Weekly, where an investigation about an oil and gas company turning Colorado neighbourhoods into industrial extraction sites definitely means a lot to readers.
That company happens to be Canadian, which doesn't guarantee The Coast would be interested. After all, there are plenty of Canadians working in the States who we don't pay special attention to. Crestone Peak Resources could easily join the list with Jim Carrey, Matthew Perry and Howie Mandel.
But it turns out Crestone is owned by something called the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. And that is the organization parliament created in 1997 to invest all the CPP deductions coming off Canadians' paycheques. The CPPIB is giant, with more than $350 billion in assets, and it's quiet. When Boulder Weekly senior editor Angela Evans emailed us about the story, Coast staff talked about it in our editorial meeting. None of us had heard of the CPPIB yet, and all of us are helping fund it, so we got very interested. We think the story will mean a lot to you.
—Kyle Shaw, editor
Were we right? Let me know at [email protected]