You might have noticed Facebook posts or Coast ads about The Deep, “Atlantic Canada’s long-form magazine.” And you may have wondered, “Hey, what is that, anyway?”
The Deep is a collaboration between The Coast and Matthew Halliday and Chelsea Murray, a couple of journalists (and a journalistic couple) who moved to Halifax from Toronto in 2014. Their arrival made a bit of a splash in Coast world after Halliday wrote a much-discussed Voice of the City called “Saying hello to Nova Scotia, for a reason.”
Earlier this year, Halliday and Murray came to The Coast for advice on starting a new journalism venture: an online magazine focused on telling true stories based in Atlantic Canada. As we talked, it quickly became apparent they and The Coast share a passion for magazine-style creative nonfiction, and a belief that eastern Canada deserves a full-time, dedicated home for it. A partnership was formed, and The Deep was hatched—The Coast providing its name and publishing resources, Murray and Halliday providing the editorial vision.
We want to provide a forum for Atlantic journalists to show what they can do with a story.
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Creatively, The Deep is audacious: We want to publish a great Atlantic story every month, the kind of writing that wouldn’t be out of place in The New Yorker or raved about on longform.org. We want to provide a new forum for Atlantic journalists to show what they can do with a story when given the space, time and resources to really dig in and go deep. We’re inspired by some of the ambitious digital storytelling that’s been revitalizing this kind of #longreads writing elsewhere, and we want to put an east-coast spin on it.
We also want to bring The Deep to audiences with live events like the storytelling nights that we’ve already started hosting. (With the next one, November 3 in Saint John, The Deep officially goes inter-provincial.)
The financial goals are modest, for now: The Deep aims to launch in mid-2017, and finance the first half-year of stories with a Kickstarter campaign, currently underway. Every dollar we take in from this campaign will go to writers, photographers and illustrators creating The Deep’s first stories.
So please, check out our campaign there—and consider getting into The Deep.
