État des lieux- Isaac Peltz Real and Raw

Fuck finances for a minute- let's talk about my brain and health.

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Today is the launch of my first état des lieux, a monthly newsletter I will send to inform everyone on the substack of what’s going on, how I am doing, and the goals that I am trying to fulfill in the next month. It is, as always, part of my goal in being completely transparent as a journalist.

This month On the Trail grew substantially. I want to say thank you to everyone– this is still the beginning phase of my plans. I hope to significantly expand operations over the next six months. I think it’s possible. Hopefully we can grow this into something particularly exceptional without ever paywalling. I never want to prevent people from accessing this or sharing it.

Here is where I am at, and my vision for the future. Fuck finances for a minute, let’s talk about vision and mental health.

I’m tired. Four days of filming with the great William Wilson, my respected friend and colleague, and I’m exhausted. I walked 64.7km according to my fitbit, I believe William walked a little less, amounting to around 50km over these few days, but that’s because he’s weak. Sometimes he would take the train to our meeting spot, and I would walk, so…

Meanwhile, mentally, I’m doing well. Feeling inspired by you folks, and positive about the future. My future that is, not the state of the world. Stuff’s bad out there.

Actually, I have hope for the future. My hope is indelible. When you see me laughing about things that are absolutely batshit insane, that’s because I find the absurdity of life to be highly entertaining. I laughed when I saw the video of me getting assaulted by the cops. I laughed when I got yelled at by a psychopath millionaire dog-whistling anti semitic language at me. I’m having a great time. The only thing standing in my way right now is my corporeality, one day I hope I can have a team (Gabrielle, Will, Aedan) but for the moment I don’t have the type of cash to pay these geniuses. One day I will.

A couple months ago I finished what is probably the largest investigation into the housing crisis ever done in French & English. I am extremely happy with the project. If you haven’t listened to the podcast, you should. Episode one and two start a bit slow, but 3-6 are the best podcast you’ll have ever heard. During this summer, I slowed down my online presence for a little while to reflect and consider what my next steps were. I came to several conclusions during my 6 week “break”.

1. I am not good at making op-eds and I do not believe that they are useful or healthy for our society, nor journalism. If this opinion frustrates you, it proves my point. I find op-eds to be divisive, inciting people’s emotions and feelings, and are a manipulative way to force people into engagement, without leaving them with appropriate amounts of substance to benefit their lives. Gabrielle is good at op-eds. When she writes them, they’re intelligent, fact based, and are more or less news with a goal. I will not be giving you any more op-eds that are written by me, however I may publish other op-eds if they come up. This will not be the goal or production of either my social media content or my publication.

2. Similar to the last point– I am not a daily. Legacy media is pretty good at daily news. In fact, I like dailies for their information, and like them less for their political and global coverage. I want to create pieces that have a point, whether it be in video, written, or podcast form. I want to do long form content. This also goes for explainer videos that I have previously done on social media– in fact what prompted my self reflection this summer was my distaste with my own explainer videos. I’m not the person to give you hot takes, viewpoints, and deliver context. I am, however, excited to be on site, showing up, and making something cool. Thus, I will devote all my energy to that.

3. I want to do various types of news-presentation to help people. I am trying to diversify so that there’s some of everything for everyone. Interviews, podcasts, videos and written. I hope this works for everyone. If I look through my stats and see that one is more engaged with, I will focus my efforts there. So far, y’all don’t seem to care about interviews. I will likely stop making those if those numbers don’t go up. Y’all seem to like my written work the most.

4. I will post when I will post. If it’s interesting and I believe that you will enjoy it, I’ll post. If there are major things going on, I will post more. If there is less going on, I will post less. This has to do with socials and with substack. These past two weeks I posted eight things total. I would have posted more, but I felt you were all tired of seeing my name pop up so I tried to hold back a bit. This week I have less, and have been working on the Toronto investigation, so I’m doing a bit less. I hope the quality and consistency of what I do will be more important than the speed at which I make things.

My plans are currently to move towards more on the field work, which means less ‘every day’ output, and more sporadic, on the ground coverage. I hope you’ll all be satisfied with that type of coverage, as this is the work that needs to be done in my view. I don’t think many others are doing this sort of journalism, and those that impress me greatly. When Christopher Curtis is out there and a dude has a shotgun in the car with him, that’s the kind of story that gets my blood boiling. Being at a protest and covering the real stories on the ground are the direction that calls to me. William Wilson has been a fantastic partner, and I’m hoping to continue developing a partnership with him.

I’m also working on a project with Aedan Burnett, which I don’t want to disclose yet. It’s a risky one, which could have some serious blowback. I'm not nervous about it, I just know that some people who follow me will react poorly. I hope you all won’t mind, but next week will be entirely devoted to this project, and possibly a bit longer. There is no doubt in my mind that this project will be important to many people, and I hope you will all give me a bit of patience with it, because I don’t want to get it out unfinished like I did with my MP investment list, I wish I had waited a bit longer on that before throwing that one out there.

That being said, Aedan has been hard at work on the site, and we are currently waiting on the federal disclosure under Carney’s government. Most of the provinces are in there, although a couple of them have some problems. The website should be updated in perpetuity. I will have a full analysis of each individual province over the next months. I want to consider the data deeply, and report back on the state of each province, and where they ideally should go.

That’s it. Reach out if you have questions or concerns, or something that you think would be news-breaking. I’m always listening.

Isaac